crontab question

[shacker]

Trying to set up a system that will cause all my Movable Type posts to be mirrored here on LJ for friends lists. Have everything working from the command line just fine, but it just won't work from the crontab no matter what I do

Comments

[jfusion]

You must have a blank line at the end of the file for cron to run. Check that.

[jfusion]

And by "file," I mean your crontab.

[shacker]

Well, again, the crontab is definitely running - I can see it in the logs, and other items in the crontab run just fine. It's just this item that fails silently. Thanks though.

cron debugging

[anonymous]

If you got a bash/sh/ksh on your system, you can use the following. It helps a lot...it's from another Unix, but it should work on OS-X (maybe with some mods). You run this script, then run your program, and voila, it runs in the cron environment. I use it a bunch.

#!/usr/bin/bash

Re: cron debugging

[shacker]

Very interesting. When I execute this (without even following it with the script I want to run), I get this at the end of the output:

/Users/shacker/bin/crondebug.sh: rm: command not found
/Users/shacker/bin/crondebug.sh: sh: command not found

In other words, it has NO awareness of paths on my system. Does that mean I need full paths to every single little thing in the perl script? There's got to be a better way...

Thanks for this!

Re: cron debugging

[yakko]

That would be because rm and sh are in /bin, which doesn't appear to be in the PATH included in the script.

As long as you've got a sane PATH, your script (and any processes it spawns) should be fine.

Re: cron debugging

[shacker]

You're right - the final solution turned out to be creating a script that reproduced my entire path env, then the script command. Thanks man...

[shacker]

Just changed my password so it's not using any special characters, still won't run from cron.

Running the script from the command line, I just noticed something else strange - the entries it creates aren't quite in the form you mentioned last night. Rather than

[blog link ] [item link]

I get

[blog link ] [http://shacker.livejournal.com/]

So there is no permalink for the reader to follow even if I could get this running from cron. Any idea what's up with that?

[shacker]

Excellent, I'll try the update tonight (busy at work today). Yep, I'm running the crontab on my home OS X box, which is also www.betips.net - cron run several other tasks that go fine, and the script does show up in the syslog.

Thanks for your work on this!

[yakko]

Have /bin/sh evaluate your script as a command:

* * * * * /bin/sh -c "/Users/shacker/bin/blaggupdate.sh"

If you have the #!/bin/sh in as the first line of blaggupdate.sh, just make sure it's executable and leave off the /bin/sh part in crontab.

Re: Another hint...

[shacker]

Good suggestion, but no joy. Thanks though. I'm really getting frustrated with this... have never been so beaten by a crontab...