TYPO3 Core

On page 6, the cronjob example configuration supposes to use an additional "user" parameter in the crontab of root:

If you are editing the root user's crontab, there will be one additional parameter to enter, i.e. the user with which the job should run. Example:
*/15 * * * * www /usr/local/bin/php /home/bob/www/typo3/cli_dispatch.phpsh scheduler

This will run the job as user “www”.

Problem: The "user" parameter is not used when in user context (even root). Using it leads to a cron error.

See the cited wikipedia article:
Some implementations of cron, such as that in the popular 4th BSD edition written by Paul Vixie and included in many Linux distributions, insert a username into the format as the sixth field, as whom the specified job will be run (subject to user existence in /etc/passwd and allowed permissions), but only in the system crontabs (/etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d/*), not in others which are each assigned to a single user to configure.

So "user" is not allowed when using crontab -e