variables not being set when CRON is ran

[jdvilla]

I have a shell scripts which emails a result to myself.

If I run it manually, everything is fine
when I run it from CRON, the file executes, but the variables are not set/saved, except for an array with email addresses...

any ideas?

[Hayl]

is it run from your own personal cron or from the /etc/crontab?

what does the script look like?

what does the line in your crontab look like?

[jdvilla]

thanks for the reply. the problem was that my path different when running CRON. It was failing on a command to jmeter (which was calling java and assuming it was in my path) so I just emailed myself the output and noticed that. Should have done that from the beginning

[bwkaz]

Sounds like it may have been the old login/interactive shell vs. non-login but interactive shell vs. non-interactive shell stuff again.

Normal shells are interactive, and are also either login shells or non-login shells. (The difference is which file gets executed at startup.)

But cron usually runs your program in a non-interactive shell, which does something different than both login and non-login shells at startup (perhaps it doesn't read any of your startup files?). That's why the $PATH was not set -- the shell startup files usually set it for you, and they don't get executed from cron, like you'd expect.

Hopefully that explains why it was doing what it was doing. :)

[jdvilla]

Thanks for the explaination. Something to remember when throwing shell scripts into CRON.