script doesn't run in cron (runs from shell just fine)

Timur Sakayev · 02-26-2007, 08:23 AM

Hello everybody,

Here is my problem this time (i've found this community very helpful, but have yet to be able to give back to the community, due to my limited knowledge). As always, seems to be very simple, and it probably is something minor that i'm missing.

I wrote this one shell script that downloads file from another machine using scp. When i run it from shell - everything works just fine, but when i put it into crontab, it refuses to run. There are no environment variables involved - the script is literally three lines. The accounts are set up so that there is no password needed to log in (via keys in .ssh)

Code:

#/bin/bash
cd /storage
scp -r bckup_user@caesar:/home/bckup_user/svn_backup/ svn_backup
chown -R bckup_user:users svn_backup/*

When i look at the log, here is what i see

Code:

Feb 23 09:30:01 phoenix /usr/sbin/cron[21767]: (bckup_user) CMD (/usr/local/scripts/svn_backup.sh > /tmp/svn-log.txt)
Feb 23 09:30:02 phoenix /usr/sbin/cron[21766]: (bckup_user) UNSAFE (bckup_user)

I tried to google for "UNSAFE" part, but didn't come up with anything.

Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

TS

asommer · 02-26-2007, 09:39 AM

My guess is that you may need to include the full path to the script in your cron entry.. At least that's one problem I've had with placing shell scripts into cron.

Had my executable in /usr/local/bin but it just wouldn't run from cron. Until I added the /usr/local/bin to the cron entry...smooth sailing after that.

Timur Sakayev · 02-26-2007, 09:45 AM

Thanks, asommer!

This doesn't seem to be the problem as i use the absolute path in the crontab.

Any other possible ideas?

TS

asommer · 02-26-2007, 09:55 AM

Are you using absolute paths in your script? Do you have selinux or anything like that enabled?

asommer · 02-26-2007, 09:57 AM

I just found this article after looking closer at the output you posted:

http://www-gatago.com/comp/unix/admin/2447745.html

Does this sound close to what you're seeing?

Timur Sakayev · 02-26-2007, 10:00 AM

oh yeah, the script uses absolute paths too.

Yup, that's what it looks like in the log. And the username does have an underscore in it. Let me test it under a different username and see if that helps, and i'll get back here ASAP.

Thanks for the info.

TS

Timur Sakayev · 02-26-2007, 12:56 PM

Well,

I just tried to run the script in crontab under a different user (without an underscore in the name) - it looks like it runs fine. so, i guess, no weird characters in the name of automatic users.

TS