[CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred. This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue. Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on? -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrnemailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca Harte Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3 ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
James B. Byrne wrote: I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred. This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue. Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on? Sure - it's pretty obvious that something in the environment is missing. Try putting env in the cron job, or run the actual job as a shell script, and in the script, put env and pipe that to a file, so that you can then compare that with your env o/p as root. mark ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
On Tuesday 07 December 2010 14:34:33 James B. Byrne wrote: I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred. This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue. Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on? Check the paths in cron. They are not necessarly the same as the paths for the shell. Tony ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
At Tue, 7 Dec 2010 09:34:33 -0500 (EST) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote: I have a fairly involved root cron task that I moved verbatim from another server. On the original server, this task ran without problem. On the new server, when this task runs via cron, which I confirm is happening by looking in the cron log, no files are transferred and no error is reported. However, if I copy cron command from roots crontab and paste it into a terminal session on the new server then the task runs to completion and the files are transferred. This task involves sshfs, fuse, and rsync and employs pki certificates for authentication. The fact that it works from the shell without alteration and yet not from cron is the issue. Does anyone have any idea where I would start to track down what is going on? Things to check: Environment issues: PATH, SHELL, etc. I would put in calls to logger and/or echo to log what is going on. Adding a '-v' (verbose flag) to selected commands to generate additional debug information can also help. Is anything making use of stdin? Does the script still work if you do something like from an interactive shell?: /dev/null ./script Is anything dependent on having access to an actual console device (eg /dev/tty)? That is, are any of the programs trying to be interactive? What are you doing about stderr's channel? Does adding '21' to the command in crontab prove enlightening? -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / hel...@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software-- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
On Tue, December 7, 2010 09:49, Brent L. Bates wrote: If you aren't already doing so, use the full path to the commands you are I have done as you suggest and that indeed has solved the problem. Thank you very much. Regards, -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrnemailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca Harte Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3 ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
Question. In a chained cron job like this: sshfs . . . /usr/bin/rsync . . . | /bin/mail -s . . . . . . Is there anyway to get a failure message from the first part to be emailed or logged? Given the resolution of this problem I gather that sshfs must not have been found and therefore I would expect an error to be reported somewhere. The chained commands evidently interfered with the propagation of this error which would have immediately identified the source of the problem. Is it possible to get errors from the individual parts of such chained commands forwarded to an email address, or logged in the system log, or both? -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrnemailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca Harte Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3 ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
At Tue, 7 Dec 2010 10:21:27 -0500 (EST) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote: Question. In a chained cron job like this: sshfs . . . /usr/bin/rsync . . . | /bin/mail -s . . . . . . Is there anyway to get a failure message from the first part to be emailed or logged? Given the resolution of this problem I gather that sshfs must not have been found and therefore I would expect an error to be reported somewhere. The chained commands evidently interfered with the propagation of this error which would have immediately identified the source of the problem. Is it possible to get errors from the individual parts of such chained commands forwarded to an email address, or logged in the system log, or both? It is probably easiest to create a shell script with all of the chaining there and use shell script flow control to deal with mailing/logging errors: #!/bin/sh -e sshfs . . . /usr/bin/rsync . . . 21 | /bin/mail -s . . . .. Or something like that (eg using '|| error-handling/reporting code' instead of -e). -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / hel...@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software-- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
James B. Byrne wrote: Question. In a chained cron job like this: sshfs . . . /usr/bin/rsync . . . | /bin/mail -s . . . . . . Is there anyway to get a failure message from the first part to be emailed or logged? Given the resolution of this problem I gather that sshfs must not have been found and therefore I would expect an error to be reported somewhere. The chained commands evidently interfered with the propagation of this error which would have immediately identified the source of the problem. Is it possible to get errors from the individual parts of such chained commands forwarded to an email address, or logged in the system log, or both? If you're going to get that complicated, why not just write a short shell script, and run that via cron. Then you can set your environment explicitly (as opposed to in your crontab, which some folks like to do). Also, if you want logs from each piece, you could then break it up, and dump/read stuff from temp files. mark ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] difference between cron and shell invocation.
On 12/7/10 9:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote: Question. In a chained cron job like this: sshfs . . . /usr/bin/rsync . . . | /bin/mail -s . . . . . . Is there anyway to get a failure message from the first part to be emailed or logged? Given the resolution of this problem I gather that sshfs must not have been found and therefore I would expect an error to be reported somewhere. The chained commands evidently interfered with the propagation of this error which would have immediately identified the source of the problem. Is it possible to get errors from the individual parts of such chained commands forwarded to an email address, or logged in the system log, or both? Cron should default to mailing anything sent to stdout or stderr to the owner of the job if you don't redirect it elsewhere. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
