Cron question

[Chuck Swiger]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 1:26 PM, John Almberg wrote:
> The trouble comes when I try to run this script with cron. I have  
> something like this in the gs user crontab:
>
> SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash
> PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/ 
> local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/gs/bin
> HOME=/home/gs
> 0 15 * * * /home/gs/bin/script.php >>/home/gs/log/script.log
>
> I can see from the cron log that cron runs script.php at the  
> appointed hour:
>
> 	Apr 24 15:00:03 on /usr/sbin/cron[72414]: (gs) CMD (/home/gs/bin/ 
> script.php >>/home/gs/log/script.log)

I believe that you are going to be better off writing a trivial  
wrapper like:

	-----

#! /usr/local/bin/bash

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/ 
local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/gs/bin
# ...other env variables you need...

touch /home/gs/log/script.log
/home/gs/bin/script.php >> /home/gs/log/script.log

	-----

...and invoking this wrapper from cron instead of trying to reset the  
shell and everything from within cron.  You can test things by doing  
an "su gs -c /bin/sh" from a root login and then trying to run your  
wrapper, which will give you a minimum environment closer to what cron  
executes under.

-- 
-Chuck