Hey guys,

Before you guys jump on me for asking this question which is asked a million times over and over.

Yes I have tried exporting my paths and variables and crontab still will not run my script. I'm sure I am doing something wrong.

I have a shell script which runs a jar file. This is not working correctly.

After reading around I have read this is commonly due to incorrect paths due to cron running via it's own shell instance and therefore does not have the same preferences setup as my profile does.

here is what my script looks like today after several modifications:

those are the most important pieces of the script, the rest are straightforward shell based.

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

If you need more info please let me know and I will make sure to include them. Thank's

try to change
to
Does it run from the commandline?

Thank you for the quick response Repo.

My apologies I must have copied and pasted incorrectly the '/' is present in my script file. and it does indeed work when run manually from the commandline. Am i loading my user profile correctly at the start of the script?

Did you want to see the my crontab and profile environment var's, maybe that would provide more insight.

You could try changing #!/bin/bash -- to #!/bin/bash -l (that's a letter l) which will simulate a login. If your script then works from cron you know it is a shell customisation issue.

You could try sourcing /etc/profile as well as /root/.bash_profile (assuming /etc/profile is not sourced in /root/.bash_profile).

Hi Catkin,

I tried changing the #!/bin/bash to #!/bin/bash -l to no avail.

I wasn't sure what you meant by sourcing /etc/profile as well as /root/.bash_profile can you be more specific?

Thank's again for the help

Then it's not a shell customisation thing. "sourcing" is executing a file of shell commands in the curent shell -- which you are doing via the . command.

Is the program reading from or writing to the terminal?

ahh okay that makes sense. thank's for breaking that down.


The program is indeed writing to the terminal in a few spots. I have tried to capture it's output in log files but they remain empty. However, my shell commands within the script file do seem to be working just fine, it's only the java call which does nothing.

anyone have any thoughts?

cron is a detached process, it doesn't have any terminals to write to, so you'd have to re-direct to files if possible. If you're specifying to write direct to a terminal inside java (I'm not a java programmer), then you'll have to change that.
Might be best if you can provide a short working version of the src for what's going wrong.

i was redirecting the output into files to be able to see the output.

I fixed the issue, i needed to also have the absolute path of the .jar file itself in the shell script. That did the trick.

Thank's for your guidance everyone!

Glad you solved it. Did you figure out why it worked at the command prompt but not when run from cron?