[lug] CRON and PATH

[David L. Anselmi]

Gordon Golding wrote:
> I'm not getting my Path when I run a backup out of cron.
> 
> I'm root running on bash, when I sign on and echo PATH, I get my full path - set in /etc/bashrc.
> When I run a script from cron and echo PATH, I get /usr/bin:/bin - as
> if I didn't run  root/.bash_profile|.bashrc etc/bashrc
> I have many other machines which set path correctly out of cron.
> I compare the above files with a "good" machine and they are byte identical.   

Which cron?  Is this root's crontab or one of the /etc files?  Is 
/bin/sh and cron the same on the good & bad machines?

crontab(5) for Vixie cron says:

"Several environment variables are set  up  automatically  by  the 
cron(8)  daemon.  SHELL  is set to /bin/sh, and LOGNAME and HOME are set 
from the /etc/passwd line of the crontab's owner. PATH is set to 
"/usr/bin:/bin"."

On Linux, /bin/sh is usually bash.  When run from cron it probably isn't 
an interactive or login shell so neither ~/.bash_profile nor ~/.bashrc 
would be run (but see BASH_ENV under INVOCATION in bash(1)).

HTH,
Dave