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Running shellscript with cronjob is making problems, executing manually not. Ideas?

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1245 / 2 Years ago, fri, june 3, 2022, 11:15:58

I made a shell script called /home/root/cron_grads.sh (chmodded 755) on my server.

In this directory are more grads-scripts like 500hPa_p0.gs (644). My main script creates a temporary file grads_exec.gs, fills it with some content and then tries to copy the content of 500hPa_p0.gs onto the end of it before executing the whole thing This works fine, even on the server if I start it manually.

But using crontab -e with:

42 0,6,12,18 * * * /home/root/grads/cron_grads.sh

... an error occurs. The script starts but grads says:

cat: 500hPa_p0.gs: File or directory not found

I am using bash in cron_grads.sh with #!/bin/bash at the top in it. crontab -e also contains SHELL=/bin/bash.

Any ideas?

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leadprogres

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3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago inglehare · Accepted Answer

This is an issue within your cron_grads.sh script. When you call it manually, I assume you're in /home/root so it would run something like:

echo test > grads_exec.gs

cat 500hPa_p0.gs >> grads_exec.gs

But if you ran that from while at /home/oli/, it would attempt to write to /home/oli/grads_exec.gs and read from /home/oli/500hPa_p0.gs. That's why cat is blowing up in your case.

To fix, either explicitly cd into the right directory (and use an absolute path):

cd /home/root

echo test > grads_exec.gs

cat 500hPa_p0.gs >> grads_exec.gs

Or use absolute paths everywhere:

echo test > /home/root/grads_exec.gs

cat /home/root/500hPa_p0.gs >> /home/root/grads_exec.gs

Or for safety's sake, both.