so i have a few shell scripts that execute wonderfully when i type them at the command line but they fail when they are run from cron.

for example, if i run a script from command line that contains

to prevent problems with for f in *.mp4 type loops, it works fine from terminal command line but when called from cron, it gives an error->
a couple other random errors as well...

so there is some difference in the shell from cron and the terminal?

i'm running ubuntu 9.10, #!/bin/bash

what are the commands i should be using to echo my environment or simulate cron environment from the terminal?

Hi,
compare cron and terminal environments with env. Shopt is bash builtin, maybe shells are different.

To add to mpiers comment, always give the full path of any command and make sure you change to the required working directory before running any commands.

And to finish this off by changing your 'for f in *.mp4; do' loop to 'find /path -iname \*.mp4 -print0|xargs -0' you can do away with the nullglob and make sure spaces in file names won't break things...