Hi,

I have a bash script on a Fedora 16 box which I use to back-up the machine.

The script does what it is supposed to in terms of backing everything up to an external drive, but part of the script doesn't work under cron.

However, if, from the command line, I run the bit which fails in the script, then it works with no problem. The command is designed to delete files older than 10 days.

The script is kicked off under root cron like this:

nice -n 19 /home/cheddar/bits/backup.sh

The command inside the script, to delete the files is this:

find "/media/Media Drive/Backups/" -type f -ctime +10 -exec rm -f {} \;

It's that command which doesn't work when the script is run with cron, even though the syntax is correct and works from the command line.

The script has a group owner of root, and group has rwx permissions.

No errors reported in /var/log/cron...

Any assistance much appreciated!

Cheddar.

Try with the full PATHs to the commands in the script.
cron executes with a limited environment.

Shouldn't find "/media/Media Drive/Backups/" -type f -ctime +10 -exec rm -f {} \; be find "/media/Media Drive/Backups/" -type f -ctime +10 -execdir rm -f '{}' ';' ? If you don't escape the curly brackets, bash should parse them to an empty list.

Hmmm, interesting ... that sounds quite logical. I'll amend the script for tomorrow night and see what happens.

Thank you!

Thanks for the suggestion. Although it didn't appear to work with "-execdir" it did work with "-exec" which I'd been trying to use; but, along with your other modifications it now works.

However, I now happen to have a separate, but related problem, which I'll create a new post for.