Path And 'cron'

[Warren Block]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, Tim Daneliuk wrote:

> In case you're interested (or anyone else listening), it seems that
> 'chown' likes to live in /usr/sbin - i.e., A place not in the default
> path.  As it happens, a root cron task is trying to run a script
> that uses 'chown' and is thus failing.  I can change the PATH just
> for root's crontab and solve the problem.  I was just curious if there
> was a way to more broadly modify the defaults used by cron.

The standard solution would be to use a full path to the command in the 
script (/usr/sbin/chown).  If it's used in multiple locations, defining 
it as a shell variable makes it maintainable:

CHOWN="/usr/sbin/chown"

${CHOWN} somefile
...
${CHOWN} anotherfile

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA