Cron – OS X cron and environment variables

cronenvironment-variablesmac-osx

I'm currently setting a number of environment variables in OS X in /etc/profile using the export command. These are all listed correctly when I check in terminal, however when a script is executed through cron none of these variables are set.

As I understand it cron runs with its own environment variables, but how can I get my custom ones into the cron environment as well?

Please explain in the simplest possible way, as you may have guessed, this isn't something I know a lot about.

Thanks,
Jack

Best Answer

I haven't checked in detail but the bash manpage explains (search for INVOCATION) that bash doesn't read /etc/profile when it's not invoked as a login or interactive shell.

The login program always launches the shell as a login shell so I guess cron does not and the shell doesn't read any profile files (according to the man page it would read the file given in the ENV variable when the shell was started but cron doesn't seem to have an option to set that).

I found it generally to be problematic to rely on any global settings (e.g. PATH) in cron job scripts so I define my own settings in every script.

Related Solutions

Linux – Check Environment Variables of a Running Process on Unix

cat /proc/<pid>/environ

If you want to have pid(s) of a given running executable you can, among a number of other possibilities, use pidof:

AlberT$ pidof sshd   
30690 6512

EDIT:

I totally quote Dennis Williamson and Teddy comments to achieve a more readable output. My solution is the following:

tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/<pid>/environ

Cron – find -delete works OK, but not with cron

The problem is that crontab doesn't have $PATH set when it runs. You can actually provide it with a path by adding this to the top of the file opened via crontab -e:

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin

(or whatever PATH you'd prefer to use). This means you can avoid specifying the full paths to commands, directly from cron.

There are multiple problems with your original command. You're basically asking the shell to do the wildcard expansion, rather than find. Secondly, you're not providing a full path for rm; use /bin/rm or /usr/bin/rm, wherever it's located on your system (see which rm).

The first argument for find is the "location to search", and then you specify the "search query" with the various -<option>s. So, the proper format of the command you want to run is:

find "/home/bkp/dbdump" -name "*.gz" -mtime +5 -exec rm -f {} \;

find "/home/bkp/dbdump" -name "*.gz" -mtime +5 delete

If you don't specify the PATH definition like above, use:

/usr/bin/find "/home/bkp/dbdump" -name "*.gz" -mtime +5 -exec /bin/rm -f {} \;

/usr/bin/find "/home/bkp/dbdump" -name "*.gz" -mtime +5 delete

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Check Environment Variables of a Running Process on Unix

Cron – find -delete works OK, but not with cron

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