Cron problem

[Tim Hallbauer]

Hey Guys and Gals,

Our Admin is out and I am trying to trouble shoot a bigger problem so I wrote a simple script that just starts a connection. I am trying to execute it from root’s cron. It executes fine when I just execute the script from the command line. I saw all the stuff about setting the environment variables, but then read that if you su – hci those should be set? Can anyone tell me what’s going on here? Any help would be appreciated as I have been fighting with this for some time now.

Cron entry

35 12 * * * 1,2,3,4,5 su – hci “-c /cloverleaf/qdx5.4.1/integrator/scripts/start_cer_law_usage”

Error message in root’s mail

Subject: Cron 1,2,3,4,5 su – hci “-c /cloverleaf/qdx5.4.1/integrator/scripts/start_cer_law_usage”

X-Cron-Env:

X-Cron-Env:

X-Cron-Env:

X-Cron-Env:

X-Cron-Env:

/bin/sh: line 1: 1,2,3,4,5: command not found

Thanks,

Tim

Topic

[Scott Lee]

Cron is expecting the 6th argument to be the start of the command.  It looks like you have too many asterisks and it is trying to execute the command ‘1,2,3,4,5’.

Scott

[Robert Milfajt]

Scott is right.  Here is an excerpt from the man page on crontab.

The crontab File Entry Format

A crontab file contains entries for each cron job. Entries are separated by

newline characters. Each crontab file entry contains six fields separated by

spaces or tabs in the following form:

minute  hour  day_of_month  month  weekday  command

These fields accept the following values:

minute 0 through 59

hour 0 through 23

day_of_month 1 through 31

month 1 through 12

weekday 0 through 6 for Sunday through Saturday

command a shell command

Hope this helps,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Tim Hallbauer]

Thanks guys. That did the trick. Sometimes another set of eyes comes in handy.

[Author]

Replies