2

I have a shellscript in /etc/myprog/myscript.sh that I would like to run every week. Therefore I created a symbolic link in /etc/cron.weekly:

root@ip-10-190-199-197:/etc/cron.weekly# ls -ltr
total 8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 895 2011-07-27 11:32 man-db
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 730 2011-09-24 14:55 apt-xapian-index
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  31 2011-11-17 05:36 myscript -> /etc/myprog/myscript.sh

To test it, I did:

cd /etc/cron.weekly
sudo ./myscript

It works perfect. However, the cronjob never actually runs for some reason. Do I need to do anything to activate cron.weekly?

The contents of my /etc/myprog/myscript.sh is:

cd /var/log/myprog/
/etc/myprog/updatescript.sh 1> `date '+/etc/myprog/logs/%Y-%m-%d-cran.log'` 2> `date '+/etc/myprog/logs/%Y-%m-%d-cran-warnings.log'`
Jeroen Ooms
  • 637
  • Do you run the computer non-stop? Do anacron jobs run? Is the /etc/myprog/myscript.sh file owned by root? Do you see any messages in syslog when the job is supposed to run? Have you tested running it hourly or some other time frame than weekly? – arrange Dec 31 '11 at 11:40

1 Answers1

1

I suspect you need to add a shebang to the start of your script to help cron know what interpreter to use. So your script would become:

#!/bin/sh
cd /var/log/myprog/
/etc/myprog/updatescript.sh 1> `date '+/etc/myprog/logs/%Y-%m-%d-cran.log'` 2> `date '+/etc/myprog/logs/%Y-%m-%d-cran-warnings.log'`

Cron may not know much about paths and the like, so you need to give it more clues.

Hamish Downer
  • 19,526