This is probably a really dumb question, but here goes. I created a backup script for a website i'm working on. The script goes like this:

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#!/bin/bash

current_date=`eval date +%m-%d-%G`
default_name="_domainname_backup"
backup_dir="$current_date$default_name"

mkdir $backup_dir

scp -r user@domain.com:/home/user $backup_dir

tar -cf $backup_dir.tar $backup_dir

gzip $backup_dir.tar

mv $backup_dir.tar.gz domain.com

rm -Rf $backup_dir
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when i run the script from the directory (not my home directory), everything works fine. I added the job into kcron to run daily. When i right-click on the task and choose 'run', I get output on my open terminal window that says "permission denied" for all the steps.

The permissions on the directory in which i want to create the file are 755, though even setting them to 777 didn't solve it. The task has to be running as my regular user, and my username does have permission to write to that directory.

I don't want to stick this in root's cron.daily, but I could do that.

any ideas?
-Kevin

Hi,

As far as I understand how cron works, a cron job gets its own shell.
The environment variables this shell gets may not be the same as you have as a user when executing commands on a commandline. Therefore there may be differences in results.

What I do in such a case is that I either set the veriables e.g. a PATH in the script or fill in the paths to all commands I'd be using. Following the latter I would use /bin/tar in stead of plain tar.

Another thing, but you probably thought of that yourself: Your script has to be executable of course.

And ... a script run by cron may not produce any output on stderr or stdout. If it does, it will not be completed. So you need to redirect any output to a log file or /dev/null

Hope this helps.


p.s. I've just upgraded to Rh9 but I can't find kcron anymore. Do you know why it is not in the distro anymore and / or whether it is still available?