Thread View: comp.sys.next.sysadmin
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Started by Mark Crispin
Sat, 26 Sep 1992 20:54
Re: 3.0: what gives with cron
Author: Mark Crispin
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 20:54
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 20:54
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I encountered the same problem with cron in 3.0. I'll bet you're piping your backup data to rsh, eh? Sorry, bunkie; rsh in 3.0 does not work under cron. I spent several hours on this problem and fairly conclusively proved that rsh just dies silently when it is run under cron. Don't think of trying an old rsh from 2.1 and seeing if that will work; you'll get a no such host name error. I reported this bug to NeXT. Judging from past performance, we can expect to see this fixed sometime in 1995. After all, 3.0 finally fixes some bugs we reported in 0.8 days.
Re: 3.0: what gives with cron
Author: Steve Hayman
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 05:17
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 05:17
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>I'll bet you're piping your backup data to rsh, eh? Sorry, bunkie; rsh in 3.0 >does not work under cron. I spent several hours on this problem and fairly >conclusively proved that rsh just dies silently when it is run under cron. One possibility is that it could be a problem with $PATH. If you add something like this to /etc/crontab * * * * * root echo path is $PATH >/dev/console and then look at the message in the console window, you'll see that cron is using "/etc:/usr/etc:/bin:/usr/bin" as a default PATH. Note the conspicuous abscence of "/usr/ucb", home of rsh, finger and many other programs. So cron won't find those programs uness you go out of your way to give it a better PATH. I.e. crontab lines like this * * * * * root rsh somewhere blah blah will fail silently. You could fix this in 2 ways - the obvious way is to hard code the pathname you want ... * * * * * root /usr/ucb/rsh somewhere blah blah or, alternatively, if you're trying to execute a shell script, you can add "PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/bin export PATH" to the script you're executing. (Setting the PATH explicitly is a good idea for scripts in general.) Also alternatively you could get the Paul Vixie public domain cron replacement program, which has many useful features not found in the standard cron. Hope this helps someone. Steve -- Steve Hayman Systems Engineer, NeXT Canada Steve_Hayman@NeXT.com
Re: 3.0: what gives with cron
Author: Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 18:53
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 18:53
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In my limited experience with cron I ALWAYS specify full pathnames to the scripts/programs to be run; I also usually make the scripts log errors to some file in /tmp or /usr/adm, so I can check whether cron has worked at all. -- Hardy ----- Meinhard E. Mayer, Department of Physics, UC Irvine e-mail: hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu (preferred) or MMAYER@UCI.BITNET
Re: 3.0: what gives with cron
Author: Steve Hayman
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1992 18:20
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1992 18:20
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One last quick point on this thread about what cron does with $PATH - after
checking a bit more, it appears that cron doesn't set the path itself, it
merely inherits whatever path is in effect when it's launched. Note that
/etc/rc does this:
PATH=/etc:/usr/etc:/bin:/usr/bin; export PATH
so anything launched from rc inherits this path.
It seems to me that you could add /usr/ucb to this list without
hurting anything (except for the idea of not tinkering with system files
if you can avoid it.)
Steve
--
Steve Hayman Systems Engineer, NeXT Canada Toronto, Ontario
NeXT mail: Steve_Hayman@NeXT.com (416) 607-4059
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