Linux – Why is (ana)cron not running any of the jobs and giving no error output

cronlinux

I have one cron job installed but not running. I installed it with crontab -e and entered the following.

0 12 * * * /var/www/drupal/scripts/dump_sites
* * * * * wall /tmp/test

I put the second command for testing purposes. There is indeed a file /tmp/test, it simply has "this is a test" in it.

When I exit crontab -e I receive no error messages. There are no log files for cron in /var/log/. I stopped cron with service cron stop and tried starting it with cron -L 2 to get better debug output, but there are still no logs.

I've ran /var/www/drupal/scripts/dump_sites manually and I get the expected behavior, i.e. output files appear where I want them to. When I try with cron, I do not get the expected behavior.

When I do ps aux | grep cron I can see it with an associated process ID.

I gave up on cron momentarily and tried anacron. ps aux | grep cron now yields the following. However; my dump_sites script still doesn't run.

devcampus :: /var/www/drupal ยป ps aux | grep cron   
root     15635  0.0  0.1  12440   928 ?        Ss   11:59   0:00 anacron -f
root     15816  0.0  0.1   4092   608 ?        S    12:04   0:00 /bin/sh -c nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
root     15818  0.0  0.1   3996   620 ?        SN   12:04   0:00 run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
root     15825  0.0  0.1   4092   680 ?        SN   12:04   0:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/apt

My /etc/anacrontab file looks like this.

# /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron

# See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details.

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

# These replace cron's entries
1       5       cron.daily       nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
7       10      cron.weekly      nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly        15      cron.monthly nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly

# period  delay  job-identifier  command
@daily    14     backup          /var/www/drupal/scripts/dump_sites

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, and I believe this box is running on a Xen virtualization server.

devcampus :: /var/www/drup
2.6.32-23-server

Update: apparently it's working with anacron.

As per request, here's dump_sites:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

DRUPAL_ROOT = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../')
SITES_ROOT = File.join(DRUPAL_ROOT, 'sites')
CONFIG_FILES = Dir.glob(File.join(SITES_ROOT, "*", "dbconfig.php"))

databases = CONFIG_FILES.map do |cf|
  contents = File.read(cf)
  contents =~ /dbname='(.*)'/ ? $1 : nil
end

databases.uniq!
databases.sort!

databases.each do |db|
  file_name = File.join(DRUPAL_ROOT, "db_dumps", "#{db}_#{Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")}.sql")
  `mysqldump -uusername -ppassword #{db} > #{file_name}`
end

Just a plain old ruby script.

Best Answer

Your cron runs should be logged in /var/log/syslog. You should be getting email if there are errors.

Usually when a script runs from the command line and won't from cron it's because of a difference in environment. It's a good idea to set the PATH variable explicitly and/or use full paths to all files and executables. I see that you've done that in your crontab entry, but you should check the script itself.

In addition to PATH there may be other environment dependencies that your script has. Without see it, I can't guess what they might be.

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