Having an odd problem running a mysqldump via crontab. I have the script running on other servers and they work fine, so not sure how to actually troubleshoot, but the script looks like the following;

rm -rf /archives/server_baks/*

if mysqldump -u root --password=pwhere --databases tables_here --add-locks | gzip > /archives/server_baks/mysql.$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%P).sql.gz
echo "ERROR: The backup failed."
fi

If I run it as a cronjob as root, it finishes in a second and a 20k file is there. If I run it from the command line as root it does the backup (takes a few minutes) but does complete the backup and can be unzipped and read successfully.

Any ideas why / how?

Hi,

First you should use absolut paths to the executable programs, because does not know about PATH set in your session. Try again and check if your problem occurs after this change.

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As much as I would love to say it can't be;

which mysqldump reveals only the one;
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump

and that is in the local path as I can type mysqld <tab> with the autocomplete, but I did update the script to the full path and it worked, so I am still curious, but won't dispute!

Thanks for the basic idea!

which finds executables in the PATH environment variable. cron usually runs under a smaller PATH than a login shell.