bash script works when interactive, endless loop when started via cron
 

Hi,

I use the following within a homebrew backup script to loop until a tape has been loaded:

Works like a charm when the script is run manually in a terminal. When started via cron however, the loop condition is never met. I can verify that the tape drive is online from an independent session, yet every 30 minutes a new instance of sleep is spawned instead of the script carrying on.

What am I missing?


-d.

What is your cron command to run your script ? Perhaps the time arguments cause your problem : they conflict with 30m on your script .

cron is set to run the script once a week, by simply invoking the name of the script with a fully-qualified path, without any stdout/stderr redirection.

Still looking for ideas...

Have you tried it with the full paths to mt-st and grep? If your cron uses a different path to your shell account it may not find the commands and the code in the backticks will never return a '1'.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Unfortunately however, using full path references didn't change a thing. :(