3

(OS is FreeBSD 8.1)

Yesterday I added 2 lines to crontab as root:

0 7 * * * curl --silent http://username:[email protected]/cron/execute/process/verbose/true >>/home/www/dev_mydomain_tld/logs/cron_process.log 2>&1
0 8 * * * curl --silent http://username:[email protected]/cron/execute/process/verbose/true >>/home/www/dev_mydomain_tld/logs/cron_process.log 2>&1

Doing the command right from shell as root works just fine. It just do some stuff, and send out some emails. The second run shouldn't send any emails, this is handled by the script. Thus the second line is only for my testing pleasure, making sure that a second run don't send out the same emails.

This morning I waited for the emails, at 7am and 8am - but nooo.

The cron log has the following to tell me

Feb  8 07:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[50878]: (root) CMD (   /usr/local/bin/bsdsar_gather)
Feb  8 07:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[50881]: (root) CMD (newsyslog)
Feb  8 07:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[50882]: (root) CMD (/usr/libexec/atrun)
Feb  8 07:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[50883]: (operator) CMD (/usr/libexec/save-entropy)
Feb  8 07:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[50886]: (root) CMD (curl --silent http://username:[email protected]/cron/execute/process/verbose/true >>/home/www/dev_mydomain_tld/logs/cron_process.log 2>&1)

[...]

Feb  8 08:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[51147]: (root) CMD (   /usr/local/bin/bsdsar_gather)
Feb  8 08:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[51149]: (root) CMD (newsyslog)
Feb  8 08:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[51150]: (operator) CMD (/usr/libexec/save-entropy)
Feb  8 08:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[51151]: (root) CMD (/usr/libexec/atrun)
Feb  8 08:00:00 webserver /usr/sbin/cron[51152]: (root) CMD (curl --silent http://username:[email protected]/cron/execute/process/verbose/true >>/home/www/dev_mydomain_tld/logs/cron_process.log 2>&1)

Also /home/www/dev_mydomain_tld/logs/cron_process.log showed no change, also no change in date. Running from shell updates it just fine.

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3
  • You should enable some sort of log rotation on your collected logfile so that it does not grow without bounds.
    – Phil Hollenback
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 9:12
  • @PhilHollenback Thanks for the tip, do you have any good resources on the subject?
    – Phliplip
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 13:50
  • Typically with freebsd you use newsyslog to rotate logs. Look at /etc/newsyslog.conf. Here's a page with some more info.
    – Phil Hollenback
    Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 8:25

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6

Is curl in the path set by cron? You should either set your PATH in a script or use the full path to curl (ie /usr/local/bin/curl or similar).

Have a look at crontab(5) for the details about environnement variables.

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1
  • Yes i just found out reading another thread :) Thanks.
    – Phliplip
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 8:54
0

The main system crontab that root has access to (/etc/crontab) should have the user name as the sixth column. (Normal users' crontab files don't)

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