Hi,

I am new with shell script and I am facing problem with setting crontab for my script. Though my script works fine when I run it from command line.

I have these packages installed on my system :
anacron-2.3-45.el5
crontabs-1.10-8
vixie-cron-4.1-77.el5_4.1

Its RHEL-5 64 bit.

I followed these steps for setting crontab :
1) crontab -e
2) */2 * * * * /home/user/filename.sh
3) save and quit

This doesn't gives me desired output.

Script which I am using is as:

APPCHK=$( ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v "grep httpd" | wc -l )
echo $APPCHK
pro_time=`date`
if [ $APPCHK -ne '0' ];
then
echo "httpd running" > /Crnfile/Crn_run.txt
else
echo "httpd not running" >> /Crnfile/Crn_stop.txt
fi

This script produces output as desired when run from command line. But using crontab it only gives output of first conditon mentioned in " if - else " clause.

Please suggest, what measures should I take to rectify it.

Regards,
Ankush

I would change the redirection even in the first clause to append the output (not overwrite)

A suggestion: if the first line is testing the number of processes matching 'httpd' you could simplify it to
As to why you are getting different behaviour when run in cron, two possibilities:
- You might be running under a different shell. You could fix it by adding
as the first line.

- There might be different environment variables set.

I would add some tracing (to a file) to make sure that the intermediate commands in the first line are returning what you expect.

2 members found this post helpful.

Just to be sure ... what is the output you expect? Is it outputting "httd running" even when it is not?