Cron job is not recognizing environment variables

[Jon Blanchard]

This is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux running bash 3.2.25(1) and CL 5.6, rev patch 2

I created a .sh file to collect thread statistics for the test site during our hospital conversion project.  The shell file is supposed to read the value of the $HCIROOT environment variable at the beginning; it isn’t, so the value of all derived vars are missing what should be there. The remainder of the shell script runs as it should, but without accomplishing anything.

The crontab entry for the script is

Code:

00 21 * * * /home/hci/getstats2.sh

Is there another method that I should be using?  The $ format is used by another cron job that runs successfully every night, so what do I need to do get the shell script to use it?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Migration Consultant
Coffee Regional Medical Center
Eastern Time Zone

Topic

[James Cobane]

John,

I’m assuming that this is scheduled under the ‘hci’ user’s cron.  You can try doing a setroot and setsite (if applicable) before running your script:

00 21 * * * setroot;setsite mysite;/home/hci/getstats2.sh

Hope this helps.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Chuck McKenna]

We have a single script that sets the root. We import that into any script that we run from cron.

The first thing that happens in the script is to set the variables. If you run it from the command line as hci, it just sets the root again. No harm done. This allows us to migrate scripts from our test site to our production site with no changes.

[Steve Carter]

Another option that may work for you:

If hci’s profile sets the environment that you need, you can try the following:

00 21 * * * (. /home/hci/.profile ;/home/hci/getstats2.sh)

–Assuming that is the location of hci’s profile.

Hope this helps.

Steve

[Jon Blanchard]

Thank you all!

I will try these out and let you know the results.

Migration Consultant
Coffee Regional Medical Center
Eastern Time Zone

[Jon Blanchard]

Found the answer, and it was quite a bit simpler than I thought:

Migration Consultant
Coffee Regional Medical Center
Eastern Time Zone

[Author]

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