Script Works, But Not with CRON

[Tim Fischer]

> I think maybe you and Keith Weatherhead have detected my 
> oversight.  PFDSK is set to "/u" in the environment for all 
> regular users, but 'cron' isn't a regular user.
> 
> Its absence in the script would explain why it works from the 
> command line, but not when run by 'cron'- that being the 
> significant difference in the environment in which it runs 
> under those two conditions.
> 
> I'll set it in the script and see what happens tonight.
> 
> Thanks all . . .
> 
> Bob (kicking himself in the head over that oversight)


I ran into a similar situation recently.  By simply throwing an environment
setting script into cron (before each job) it takes care of it in one place
that is easily maintainable.  For instance:

20 5 * * 1-5 sh -c ". /u/cron.env; /u/job1"

Basically, the cron.env is just the cron environment.  It's kind of tedious
to add this to all appropriate cron jobs (we have a ton of jobs that run
through cron) but once it's in place, it's very easy to maintain.

-Tim