Hello,

My system is a Debian Sarge. The problem is that no matter what i do cron executes with the same environment setting every time.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
_=/usr/bin/env
PWD=/home/username
LANG=en_GB
HOME=/home/username
SHLVL=2
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US:en_GB:en
LOGNAME=username

It completely ignores ~/.bash_profile /etc/profile /etc/bash.bashrc

My shell script is linked to bash i.e. /bin/sh -> bash

I also tried editing the /etc/crontab to add the environment settings i wanted but it didnt work.

The aim was to use keychain to automate backup but although the scripts work fine from login they dont from cron because of the missing variables SSH_...

Nothing was mentioned about this in the documentation I followed and although many people have had similar problems the information is patchy.

The main question is,
Where to change environment variables for cron jobs?

Thank you for reading this post

You should be able to set most environment settings in the actual crontab. And don't edit the /etc/crontab, add them by doing: crontab -e

Globally (for all users), cron execution environment may be changed by editing the /etc/crontab file. See the crontab manual page in section 5 for more information:
For executing a specific job with the full environment from the ~/.bashrc file, I find using a wrapper script is a useful approach.

Thank you both for the quick responce.

However, i am still a bit confused with regards to keychain. I compared two howtos (below) on how to install keychain and none of them mentioned that i must add ssh-agent environment variables to the crontab -e or using a wrapper script.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/209

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...9Backup#N10050

Are they just out of date?

When setting up public key authentication, you can choose to add a passphrase to access the keypair. If you don't do this, you won't need to use the ssh-agent.