Running a simple shell script as a cronjob

Question

I have a very simple shell script I need to run as a cronjob but I can t get even the test scripts to run  Here s and example script    home myUser scripts test sh     bin bash touch file txt   crontab              home myUser scripts test sh   The script runs fine from the terminal but can t get it to run as a cronjob  So far I ve tried these in crontab   SHELL  bin sh PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  sbin  bin  usr sbin  usr bin             bin bash  home myUser scripts test sh   And this in the the script file   PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  home myUser scripts   From what I ve gathered the solution might be in the PATH variable but I can t figure out what it is since my understanding is very limited at this point  So my question is  how do I get my scripts to run as cronjobs   EDIT  the file has rwx permissions for all users  This is just for testing purposes   EDIT  cronjobs such as           touch  home myUser scripts test txt work but it wont run scripts

User · Answer

Try      cat test sh     bin bash   bin touch file txt   cron as               bin sh  home myUser scripts test sh   And you can confirm this by      tailf  var log cron

User · Answer

Specify complete path and grant proper permission to scriptfile  I tried following script file to run through cron      bin bash  bin mkdir  scratch ofsaaweb CHEF FICHOME ficdb bin crondir   And crontab command is             bin bash  scratch ofsaaweb CHEF FICHOME ficdb bin test sh   It worked for me

User · Answer

The easiest way would be to use a GUI   For Gnome use gnome-schedule  universe   sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule    For KDE use kde-config-cron  It should be pre installed on Kubuntu   But if you use a headless linux or don  t want GUI  s you may use   crontab -e   If you type it into Terminal you  ll get a table  You have to insert your cronjobs now  Format a job like this                              YOURCOMMAND -     -     -     -     -                                                    ----- Day in Week  0 to 7   Sunday is 0 and 7                     ------- Month  1 to 12               --------- Day in Month  1 to 31         ----------- Hour  0 to 23   ------------- Minute  0 to 59    There are some shorts  too  if you don  t want the       reboot -- gt  only once at startup  daily --- gt  once a day  midnight -- gt  once a day at midnight  hourly -- gt  once a hour  weekly -- gt  once a week  monthly -- gt  once a month  annually -- gt  once a year  yearly -- gt  once a year   If you want to use the shorts as cron  because they don  t work or so     daily -- gt  0 0        midnight -- gt  0 0        hourly -- gt  0          weekly -- gt  0 0     0  monthly -- gt  0 0 1      annually -- gt  0 0 1 1    yearly -- gt  0 0 1 1

User · Answer

It should run properly at cron also  Please check below things   1- You are editing proper file to set cron   2- You have given proper permission execute permission  to script mean your script is executable

User · Answer

What directory is file txt in  cron runs jobs in your home directory  so unless your script cds somewhere else  that s where it s going to look for create file txt   EDIT  When you refer to a file without specifying its full path  e g  file txt  as opposed to the full path  home myUser scripts file txt  in shell  it s taken that you re referring to a file in your current working directory  When you run a script  whether interactively or via crontab   the script s working directory has nothing at all to do with the location of the script itself  instead  it s inherited from whatever ran the script   Thus  if you cd  change working directory  to the directory the script s in and then run it  file txt will refer to a file in the same directory as the script  But if you don t cd there first  file txt will refer to a file in whatever directory you happen to be in when you ran the script  For instance  if your home directory is  home myUser  and you open a new shell and immediately run the script  as scripts test sh or  home myUser scripts test sh    test sh won t work   it ll touch the file  home myUser file txt because  home myUser is your current working directory  and therefore the script s    When you run a script from cron  it does essentially the same thing  it runs it with the working directory set to your home directory  Thus all file references in the script are taken relative to your home directory  unless the script cds somewhere else or specifies an absolute path to the file

[bash] Running a simple shell script as a cronjob

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