Carsten Haese wrote: > On 23 Nov 2005 16:23:11 -0800, vagrantbrad wrote > >>I'm using python 2.4 running on Fedora Core 4. I have written a python >>program called ipscan.py that checks the external ip address of my >>cable internet connection, and on change, will update the dns records >>at my dns provider, zoneedit. So basically, I've setup dynamic dns >>using python. Once the ip compare and/or update is complete, I log the >>results to a text file called update.log. When I run the program in >>a bash shell with the command "python ipscan.py", the program runs fine >>and the results are appended to update.log. When I run this program >>as a cron job under the root user with the previously mentioned >>command, the program runs without errors but does not append an >>entry to the log. The permissions on the update.log file should not >>be an issue since I'm running the cron job as root, but I've given >>root write permissions just to be safe. What would cause the >>logging to work at a command prompt but fail in cron? I'm not >>getting any errors in the cron logs or /var/spool/mail/root. > > > You're not giving us much detail about your script, so we can only guess. My > guess is that your python script is either not invoked at all or it dies > (raises an exception) before appending to the update.log. > > You should keep in mind that cron jobs don't run in a normal login shell, > don't have the normal environment variables, and are not attached to a tty. > Any of those factors can conceivably cause a script to fail under cron when it > works fine from a shell. > Since we're guessing, *my* guess would be that the cron-triggered runs are running in some directory other than the one the manually-triggered jobs are, and that there is a separate update.log file in that directory.
The fix, of course, would be to use an absolute path to identify the log file (if I'm right). regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
