Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/06/22/10:26:56
On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> Hi Eric, Charles,
>
> Thanks for the help guys, that got me going in the right direction.
>
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Eric Blake <ebb9 AT XXX DOT XXX> wrote:
<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PCYMTNQREAIYR>. Thanks.
> > According to G.W. Haywood on 6/19/2006 3:53 AM:
> >
> > > When run from the command line the job works ... and when run from
> > > the crontab it fails...
> >
> > It's probably a bug in your cron setup, rather than a bug in tar. Have
> > you run cron-diagnose? Can you get simpler cron tasks to work? Remember
> > that cron is run as a different user than the normal command line, so
> > permissions do play a role on what the cron script can do.
>
> The cron instance was running as the same user that could successfully
> run the tar job from the command line, so it wasn't permissions, but I
> think you're right, Eric, about it being the cron setup. I think that
> the problem is there's no MTA running on the box. Even though there's
> no mail to be sent by cron it seems to be trying to connect to an MTA
> before finding that there's no mail to send. Unfortunately, when it
> finds there's no MTA it terminates the job. (If I had syslog running
> it might tell me... :)
Check the Windows event log. Or install a syslog daemon (Cygwin has 2 --
the original syslog in inetutils, and syslogng in syslog-ng).
> When I redirected tar's stdout (as well as the existing redirection of
> its stderr) to a file, the tar job in the crontab ran to completion.
Yes, cron will try to email you the output of a job if it's not redirected
into a file, even if the output is empty.
> Funny thing is, I'm sure I have several Linux machines kicking around
> which are running jobs from crontabs but not running MTAs. I'd better
> check that, I suppose...
You don't need to *run* an MTA, only to have an MTA installed (e.g.,
sendmail). FWIW, Cygwin has a few MTAs that you can use (ssmtp, exim).
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Stepp, Charles wrote:
>
> > running from cron does not set the environment the same as with an
> > interactive session.
>
> Charles, I was pretty sure that it wasn't an environment problem as
> the command shouldn't be relying on anything in the environment for
> its execution (sure, you never know until you try:).
Well, if your cron job says "tar" instead of "/usr/bin/tar", you're
relying on the environment.
Igor
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