Cron Job Script – Script Does Not Work from Cron or Does Not Start

centoscronlinuxscripting

I created a script to do something (after I reduced it just to echo "IS FINALLY WORKING" for testing purpose). If I type

#bash /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh

it works ok.

The problem is that I need a cron to access it and it doesn't work.

To set up the cron I used:

crontab -e

15 * * * * /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh

15 * * * * bash /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh

I see no result at all.

Also I tried to log it

15 * * * * /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh > cronscriptlog.log

The log is empty.

The os is CentOS 5.5.

Best Answer

Make sure /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh doesn't rely on anything outside cron's default PATH. CentOS has the default PATH set to /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin.

You may wish to create cron jobs like this:

15 * * * * ( . /etc/profile && /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh )

15 * * * * su - user /var/www/html/somedir/script.sh

to get an execution environment similar to that of your command line.

Related Solutions

Cron – script works manually but not in cron job

There's an obvious mistake in your cron line: you redirect error output to /dev/null. Don't do this, and look at your mail to see what went wrong.

A common problem with cron jobs is that they get a very limited environment: your .profile is not read. You may need to define some environment variables for your script to run.

ADDED: You did:

cp -rf /opt/rrdtool-1.4.4/lib/perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/* /usr/lib/perl/site_perl

Bad idea! You should not put your own files in /usr (outside /usr/local). That area is reserved to the package manager. Sure, it's easy now, but you will run into trouble tomorrow (for example when you upgrade rrdtool), and it'll be hard to debug then.

Instead, do what people have been recommending and define the necessary environment variables in your script (or source ~/.profile); you need PERL5LIB (and perhaps others).

Linux – bash script returns “out of memory” in cron, but not in shell

Even though limits.conf is commented out, I suggest that you test just to make sure. One way would be to create a cronjob that just contains something like "ulimit -a | Mail -s 'limits' me@example.com" to have the info emailed to you. Once you know what the limits are, then you can just reset them in the shell script that actually runs the rsync:

#!/bin/bash
ulimit -d unlimited
ulimit -m unlimited
ulimit -s unlimited
rsync [...]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron – script works manually but not in cron job

Linux – bash script returns “out of memory” in cron, but not in shell

Related Topic