[lug] cron question
Walter Pienciak
walter at frii.com
Tue Oct 24 15:16:23 MDT 2000
On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Michael Wegener wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Is there any reason why cron might be picky about what it chooses to
> run? I run cron as root with a mixture of scripts (which run fine) and
> PATH-resident commands (i.e. echo and sitecopy). All show up in the cron
> logs, but "sitecopy" and "echo" never run and I can't figure out why
> there should be a difference. Any ideas what I'm missing?
Hi,
Your $PATH is not what cron uses when it runs. So even though a file
may be in your $PATH, there's no guarantee it's in cron's $PATH.
And that goes for shell builtins too -- the echo builtin in your $SHELL
may not do the same thing as the echo builtin in cron's $SHELL (probably
/bin/sh). It's easier to force use of the "real" echo by using the
full pathname of the version with the behavior you prefer (/usr/bin/echo,
/usr/ucb/echo, ...)
Summary: Either use full pathnames for your executables or man cron to
see which file you can set cron's environment from, so they *are* in
cron's $PATH. The first is a lot easier. The second is a good thing to
know.
Walter
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