I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred.
This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue.
Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on?
James B. Byrne wrote:
I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred.
This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue.
Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on?
Sure - it's pretty obvious that something in the environment is missing. Try putting env in the cron job, or run the actual job as a shell script, and in the script, put env and pipe that to a file, so that you can then compare that with your env o/p as root.
mark
On Tuesday 07 December 2010 14:34:33 James B. Byrne wrote:
I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred.
This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue.
Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on?
Check the paths in cron. They are not necessarly the same as the paths for the shell.
Tony
At Tue, 7 Dec 2010 09:34:33 -0500 (EST) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred.
This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue.
Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on?
Things to check:
Environment issues: PATH, SHELL, etc.
I would put in calls to logger and/or echo to log what is going on. Adding a '-v' (verbose flag) to selected commands to generate additional debug information can also help.
Is anything making use of stdin?
Does the script still work if you do something like from an interactive shell?:
</dev/null ./script
Is anything dependent on having access to an actual console device (eg /dev/tty)? That is, are any of the programs trying to be interactive?
What are you doing about stderr's channel? Does adding '2>&1' to the command in crontab prove enlightening?
-
James B. Byrne -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Robert Heller -
Tony Molloy