Question

5

executing a shell every minute using cron

rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 29702 / 1 Year ago, sun, april 9, 2023, 12:18:24

i want to run this bash code every minute using cron. I saved it onto /root/activate.sh

#!/bin/bash



for file in /home/user/torrents/*.torrent



do

if [ "$file" != "/home/user/torrents/*.torrent" ]; then

echo [`date`] "$file" added to queue. >> /var/log/torrentwatch.log

/usr/bin/transmission-remote localhost:9091 -a "$file"

mv "$file" "$file".added

sleep 1

fi

done

permission is set -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 278 May 27 01:27 activate.sh

then inside my crontab -e i placed this

* * * * * root sh /root/activate.sh

the script does not execute and i get this log error

May 27 01:40:02 media CRON[3556]: (root) CMD (root sh /root/activate.sh)

May 27 01:40:02 media CRON[3555]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

---after a minute---

May 27 01:41:01 media CRON[3582]: (root) CMD (root sh /root/activate.sh)

May 27 01:41:01 media CRON[3581]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

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ampust

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answered 1 Year ago jokaned · Accepted Answer

First off, why aren't you just using transmission's watch-dir feature?

The crontab entry is wrong, it should be * * * * * /root/activate.sh when you add it with crontab -e. /etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d/* takes an extra username field, but the user specific crontabs which you set with the crontab command, does not have a username field; the jobs are run as the user that ran crontab.

Also, since this script operates on files in user's homedir, I would've run the job as that user. There's nothing about that script that requires root permissions, apart from maybe writing to that log file, but you can just change ownership of that logfile instead.

As for the script, I'd modify it a bit:

#!/bin/bash



for file in ~user/torrents/*.torrent; do

    [[ -f "$file" ]] || continue

    transmission-remote -a "$file" && mv "$file" "$file.added" || continue

    printf '[%s] %s added to queue

' "$(date)" "$file"

    sleep 1

done >> /var/log/torrentwatch.log

Lastly, you should avoid adding extensions for scripts, and especially not use .sh when the script is a bash script, not an sh script.