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I am a bit baffled here, and not really sure how to debug this. I have a self-written bash script, that checks if a samba share is active, and if not, sends me an email.

Script is in /root/SKRIPTS/, permission looks like this:

-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   281 Nov  8 08:54 test_samba_shares.sh
-rwx------   1 root  wheel    39 Nov  7 13:56 smbclient.cred

Content of the .sh script is this:

smbclient -L 10.0.0.1 -A /root/SKRIPTS/smbclient.cred | grep -q Backup

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "Backup_* mounted, nothing to do"
else
    echo "Subject: Samba has failed" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -v [email protected]
fi

return 1;

/etc/crontab looks like this (entry only)

10 1 * * * root /root/SKRIPTS/test_samba_shares.sh

The thing is, if I, as root, run this, it works flawlessly. But every night I get an email that samba has failed, indicating that the cron script somehow trips into the else path. How can this be? Am I missing something obvious here? What would be the best way to debug this?

Thanks for your help

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  • 2
    First thing, if you what to make sure your bash script is being interpreted by bash, make #!/bin/bash the first line in the script. Otherwise cron may be executing the script under /bin/sh which may not link to bash and will certainly not give you all the features as /bin/bash.
    – doneal24
    Nov 12, 2018 at 15:28
  • For further troubleshooting, start with the cron tag's info page
    – glenn jackman
    Nov 12, 2018 at 18:16

1 Answer 1

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Sometimes, cron jobs don't run with the $PATH that you might be expecting. First and foremost, I would try fully-qualifying the path to your smbclient executable, just to eliminate that as a possibility. Or, explicitly export your PATH in the wrapper script that's called by cron.

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  • You can also set the PATH environment variable in the crontab file itself (but be sure to put that before the item you want it to apply to).
    – Gordon Davisson
    Nov 13, 2018 at 6:02
  • 1
    That was it, thanks a lot! I will keep the PATH issue in mind for the next scripts, greatly appreciated.
    – Sebastian
    Nov 13, 2018 at 8:00

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