cron and a dosemu session
 

I'm running a hamradio system under DOSEmu and have been trying to get cron to restart it if it crashes. I've written a shell script that works PERFECT if I run it manually, however if cron attempts to execute it, somehow it fails to restart the process.

My cron line is:
*/5 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/noscheck

My noscheck script is:
#! /bin/sh

GOOD=`fping nos.n1uro.ampr.org |awk '{print $3}' `
PID=`ps ax|grep dos|grep nos|awk '{ print $1}' `
if [ -z $PID ]; then
echo "MFNOS is $GOOD, resetting..."
su -c /home/n1uro/n n1uro &
sleep 30
fping nos
exit 0
fi
if [ $GOOD != alive ]; then
echo "MFNOS is $GOOD, resetting..."
PID=`ps ax|grep dos|grep nos|awk '{print $1}' `
kill -9 $PID
su -c /home/n1uro/n n1uro &
sleep 30
fping nos
exit 0
fi
echo "MFNOS is $GOOD"
exit 0
fi
exit 0

and finally the 'n' script is:
#!/bin/sh
cd /path/to/n
sudo ip route add x.x.x.x via y.y.y.y dev sl0 table 1
setuid user sudo nice -19 dosemu -f /etc/dosemu/nos.conf -d -n
exit 0


Sometimes the program simply hangs and dosemu doesn't exit (note: I'm running 2 concurrent DOSEmu sessions so capturing the right pid is important). Again if I run it manually it's perfect and the session reloads. Via cron however, it fails... any ideas? I'm pretty stumped on this one.

cron has its own environment, therefore probably your commands are simply not found. You need to set PATH or use full path.
also insert set -xv at the beginning of the script to see what's happening and redirect stdout and stderr into files.

Actually the whole process is quite deep and requires an actual user to execute it.
I was able to trace the processes of each script days ago and realized that this
as it is will be impossible. I'll need to research another way.

Because of the nature of the sequence of tasks, it's impossible to reach the goal of this being a working cronjob.

Marking as resoloved just to close this thread.