cron mystery

[Robin Becker]

Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Robin Becker wrote:
> [ ... ]
>> before
>> ##################
>> SHELL=/bin/sh
>> MAILTO=user
>>
>> 13 3 * * *      $HOME/bin/daily
>> 19 * * * *      $HOME/bin/hourly
>>
>>
>> after
>> ##################
>> SHELL=/bin/sh
>> MAILTO=user
>>
>> 13 3 * * *      /home/user/bin/daily
>> 41 * * * *      /home/user/bin/hourly
>>
>>
>> and at 41 past the hour the hourly job came back.
>>
>> Is it the HOME variable or the act of rewriting? User did have home 
>> defined in /etc/passwd.
> 
> I suspect that $HOME isn't being defined as one might expect-- cron 
> provides a very minimal shell environment for scripts it runs.
> 
except that I have exactly the same script running on another box with the same 
freeBSD version and that runs things fine. Looking in man 5 crontab seems to 
suggest that SHELL=/bin/sh & HOME, LOGNAME are set from the user passwd entry.
-- 
Robin Becker