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Here's what I have in my crontab:

*  *  *  *  * /bin/bash /home/user_name/script.sh

Here's what's in the file:

#!/bin/bash

cd /var/www/sites/site1
sudo svn update *

cd /var/www/sites/site2
sudo svn update *

The script is set to +x.

Any ideas on why it won't run in cron? It runs fine when I run it manually.

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Does the cron log give you any information at all? – Frands Hansen May 26 '11 at 13:36
The only thing in there is: TIMESTAMP server CROND[4621]: (root) CMD (/bin/bash /home/user_name/script.sh ) a bunch of times. – Joshua McGinnis May 26 '11 at 13:38
Do you have other entries in your crontab, do those work? – Lucky Luke May 26 '11 at 15:48
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Any reason you have /bin/bash in cron invocation? The #!/bin/bash in the script itself should do the same thing. Also make sure that the script is configured to executable (chmod +x/chmod 755). Verify that you want to run the program under your account, otherwise specify the user with the sudo -u "USERNAME" command. Also check and make sure that your account (or the account you want it to run under) has the NOPASSWD option added in /etc/sudoers (more info here:http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/sudoers.man.html).

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I added sudo -u my_user to the script and I think it's working now. However, now when I try to run the script manually, I get a permission denied. Why would that be? I'm logged in as the same user. – Joshua McGinnis May 26 '11 at 14:16
When you run crontab by editing it with crontab -e it should always run as your user (though I could be wrong on that one, I was trying to research what user cron jobs run as). In that case, you shouldn't need to specify the user. Just make sure your user account has NOPASSWD added in /etc/sudoers. If you want to test, you could always add an to a junk file with the sudo command... something like "sudo echo date >/tmp/scriptlastrun" just to see if its working how you expect. – Matthew May 26 '11 at 14:35
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up vote 3 down vote

You might also need to remove "requiretty" option from /etc/sudoers file, if your distribution has it there by default.

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I know this to be true on Redhat, CentOS, Fedora. – steve.lippert May 26 '11 at 15:57
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