Hibernate from cron
 

Hi

I'm trying to make my media center (Ubuntu 10.10 with XBMC 10.1) hibernate automatically.

I have added a task to cron (something like 50 22 * * * /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh) as root, and sudo crontab -l displays the task as expected.

But when cron tries to run the task it logs the following error in syslog : grandchild (#xxxxx) failed with exit status 127

/etc/acpi/hibernate.sh does exist, and I can run it from a terminal as root.

Any ideas ?

Kim

@ Reply
 

Hi Kim,

Try the following steps:

1. vi /hibernate
2. Put the following lines in this file:

cd /etc/acpi
./hibernate.sh

3. Save the file and exit
4. chmod 755 /hibernate (Make it 777 if you want to make it available for all
5. In crontab put the following line 50 22 * * * /hibernate

And the reason I can think of why you getting that message is because the path you have given in crontab is unable to locate the hibernate.sh file. I think the best way to work with cron is to create script and automate using cron.

I hope this helps.

Hi

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately that gave exactly the same result :scratch:

I can run /hibernate as root.

Kim

@ Reply
 

Try this:

In crontab put the following line 50 22 * * * sh /hibernate

Given that cron has a minimal env eg $PATH, maybe it's a cmd inside the script that has the issue? Ensure you are using the full path to all cmds & files referenced in the script.

Also, add
to the script to get a debug output.

Hi

Thanks for the answers.

I have been examining the hibernate script, and it does call pm-hibernate without paths, so that probably is the cause of the 127 status.

I'm not much for modifying the script as it is a system script.

I have solved the problem by modifying a daemon, one I was using in the project anyway, to call hibernate.sh at the appropriate time, and it works.

But thanks for the help anyway.

Kim