Who is the acting user for cron updates drupal when creating a triggered rule?

Question

Who is the acting user for cron updates drupal when creating a triggered rule? What I'm referring to is the php variable available to the developer when using the custom php code option in the "add a condition" widget. Is the acting user supposed to be anyone who is logged in at the time the cron runs? Or does this have to be someone who navigates to cron.php? The reason I'm asking is that I want to use the cron to kick off a sql query that looks to see if someone meets the requirements to earn a certain badge I've created for a site like SO. I know I could just use the view content event, but since that fires every time someone views a node, I'm trying to avoid that.

Answer 1

It depends on how cron is triggered, for cron jobs, it will be the anonymous user.