[KLUG Members] Cron

[Peter Buxton]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 09:28:59AM -0400, bfdamkoehler@worldnet.att.net was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> You get a very minimal environment from a cron script.

True. Setting the command 'env | sort' in `crontab -e` shows:

HOME=/var/home/peter
LOGNAME=peter
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
PWD=/var/home/peter
SHELL=/bin/sh
SHLVL=1

whereas my normal env under bash runs 30 entries.  You can set any
environment variable in your crontab, not just PATH, exactly as you'd
set it in a sh script.

lunitix's crontab entries look okay, though... lunitix, where and how
are you entering your cron jobs? Do you use the command `crontab -e`? I
noticed that the crontab command on Debian logs user changes to syslog:

Sep 15 00:43:33 grimace crontab[651]: (peter) BEGIN EDIT (peter)
Sep 15 00:43:54 grimace crontab[651]: (peter) REPLACE (peter)
Sep 15 00:43:54 grimace crontab[651]: (peter) END EDIT (peter)
Sep 15 00:44:01 grimace /usr/sbin/cron[393]: (peter) RELOAD (crontabs/peter)
Sep 15 00:44:02 grimace /USR/SBIN/CRON[656]: (peter) CMD (env|sort)
Sep 15 00:44:09 grimace crontab[664]: (peter) BEGIN EDIT (peter)
Sep 15 00:44:16 grimace crontab[664]: (peter) REPLACE (peter)
Sep 15 00:44:16 grimace crontab[664]: (peter) END EDIT (peter)

I imagine other Linux distros do the same. What do you see in the log
files, and in /var/spool/cron/crontabs?

> When you get your script running you will probably want to turn off
> the mail messages from cron. To do so add " >/dev/null 2>/dev/null" to
> the end of your cron line.

Yup. And:

command &> /dev/null

{ command1 ; command2 ; } &> /dev/null

also redirect both stdout and stderr to /dev/null.

-- 
-4
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