The security hole of running the cron scripts as root is a matter of privilege escalation. One should never run a script as root that could be run with lower privileges, as a bug in the script could lead to a root exploit.
Your point, in general, is well taken, but the ideal solution is not obvious to me. Charles -- If you have A double chin You've two Good reasons To begin using Burma-Shave http://burma-shave.org/jingles/1938/if_you_have
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