Hi all,
I hope someone can help me. I have a scirpt that does not seem to be running via cron. It's basically something written by one of our developers to export some Oracle databases every night. It runs fine from the command line but does not work via cron.

The script:
[root@localhost script]# ls -al secfin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oracle oracle 259 Dec 5 17:48 secfin

#!/bin/sh
logfile="secfin`date +%a%b%d`.log"
dmp="secfin`date +%a%b%d`.dmp"
path=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/

echo $path
echo $dmp
echo $path

exp system/manager@secfin FULL=Y file=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/"$dmp" log=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/"$logfile"

The crontab:
[root@localhost ~]# crontab -u oracle -l
30 0 * * 1-5 /home/oracle/backup/script/secfin

So if I su to oracle and cd to /home/oracle/backup/script followed by ./secfin it works fine but via cron no joy.

The cron log shows:

Dec 28 00:30:01 localhost crond[19465]: (oracle) CMD (/home/oracle/backup/script/secfin)

I'm a bit stuck at this point If there is any one out there that can help I'd be eternally grateful. If there is any more info needed please let me know.

Many thanks

Jon

Can't see it. Wasn't there an email sent? If not you could try troubleshooting by forcing a MAILTO=some@addr.ess in the users crontab plus adding a line in the script (right below the first one) to "set -xe" which would dump debug output and exit on first error (thus forcing an email to be sent).

Thanks Unspawn for coming back to me. I had not even thought to check the mail log, it's always the obvious things that get missed. Anyway it doesn't seem to like line in either script as can be seen from the messages:
Message 217:
From oracle@localhost.localdomain Wed Jan 10 00:30:01 2007
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:30:01 GMT
From: root@localhost.localdomain (Cron Daemon)
To: oracle@localhost.localdomain
Subject: Cron <oracle@localhost> /home/oracle/backup/script/secfin
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/home/oracle>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=oracle>
X-Cron-Env: <USER=oracle>

/home/oracle/backup/secfin/
secfinWedJan10.dmp
/home/oracle/backup/secfin/
/home/oracle/backup/script/secfin: line 10: exp: command not found

&
Message 218:
From oracle@localhost.localdomain Wed Jan 10 00:30:01 2007
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:30:01 GMT
From: root@localhost.localdomain (Cron Daemon)
To: oracle@localhost.localdomain
Subject: Cron <oracle@localhost> /home/oracle/backup/script/secfin2
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/home/oracle>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=oracle>
X-Cron-Env: <USER=oracle>

/home/oracle/backup/secfin2/
secfin2WedJan10.dmp
/home/oracle/backup/secfin2/
/home/oracle/backup/script/secfin2: line 10: exp: command not found

The command in the script is:
exp system/manager@secfin FULL=Y file=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/"$dmp" log=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/"$logfile"

I did a man on exp and it's a recognised command. Could it be something to do with the fact that the oracle users default shell is KSH. But that's being sourced by the line #!/bin/sh right???

The man page of exp refers to the exponential function in C language. In your case exp is an ORACLE function. You have to put the full path of exp in your script, e.g.

${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/exp ...

where ${ORACLE_HOME} refers to the directory where Oracle has been installed.

and there you have it...

Hello again,
I just got word from the developer that it's still not working even though he now references the full path to exp:

[root@localhost script]# more secfin
#!/bin/sh
logfile="secfin`date +%a%b%d`.log"
dmp="secfin`date +%a%b%d`.dmp"
path=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/

echo $path
echo $dmp
echo $path

/home/oracle/product/9.2.0/bin/exp system/manager@secfin FULL=Y file=/home/oracle/backup/secfin/"$dmp" log=/home/oracle/backup/secfi
n/"$logfile"

Thanks so much for the help so far but any other ideas?

Jonny

What about the error messages from mail log? Are they the same as before?

Sorry for posting on a thread that's this old, but just in case someone else has this problem...

You're problem is that the cron does not automatically source profiles. You have to source it in your script (a good practice anyway).

Either of the two solutions below will work.

#!/bin/ksh

#
# source the profile
#
. ~/.profile

#
# If you don't want to see the output,
# you can redirect the output
#
# This will redirect STDOUT AND STDERR to /dev/null
# so you won't see it.
#
. ~/.profile > /dev/null 2>&1

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