Ubuntu - Cron jobs don't run

[feenster99]

Hi all,

Got a Ubunutu 6.06 server running. I have some jobs to Crontab for root to run every day at 9am. The jobs in question are scripts stored in /scripts, with chmod a+x permissions, chowned by root:root. For some reason though, they don't run. I have restarted cron, and the server has even been rebooted since, but no joy.

The scripts do very basic things, such as "du -hs *" in a particular folder. Any idea what could be wrong?

Matt

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Have you enabled the root user? IIRC root is disabled in all Ubuntu distros by default.

 

[feenster99]

Yeah, root is enabled, as I can login as root. But perhaps that is unconnected to cron - should I chown all the scripts to my main login instead?

Matt

P.S Top marks for the quick reply!

 

[Una]

Stupid question but is your cron daemon running/installed right?

 

[Hate]

shove something silly in /etc/cron.hourly/ to test that cron's doing its job

 

[feenster99]

Hi,
I believe it is - i haven't tweaked anything to do with Cron, so it is effectively a fresh install.

Matt

 

[Hate]

well you've got about 25 minutes from this post till your cron.hourly folder gets run

 

[feenster99]

Humm, chowning stuff to my main login causes problems. I am trying to do "du -hs *" on a folder which contains lots of subfolders, owned by other users. Therefore, my script fails as it doesn't have permission to count the folder sizes

Matt

 

[Dj_Jestar]

have you "chmod a+x scriptname" ?

change the cron to have:

* * 1 * * /path/to/script 2> /var/logs/cron-error

then read the cron-error file to see any error messages.

 

[feenster99]

have you "chmod a+x scriptname" ?

change the cron to have:

* * 1 * * /path/to/script 2> /var/logs/cron-error

then read the cron-error file to see any error messages.

I've done that...Will wait and see what comes up now

When i've chmod a+x something, how come I still need to call "sh scriptname" to execute it?

Matt

 

[Una]

Because it needs to be in your $PATH otherwise (ie /usr/bin/ etc..) to be able to just be called by name. Maybe you have missed off #!/bin/sh off the script header as well.

 

[feenster99]

Because it needs to be in your $PATH otherwise (ie /usr/bin/ etc..) to be able to just be called by name. Maybe you have missed off #!/bin/sh off the script header as well.

Yep, didn't have the script header bit in any of them. Maybe that might help

 

[kiwi]

commands in cron must be called from their full path, e.g. /usr/sbin/du (i dunno if it's actually there without checking).