Re: /etc/profile not being executed by cron job

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Al Goodniss wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Please point me to what I missed. I have a simple cron job doing backups
> using tar and find. Works flawlessly in an interactive shell. Cron also
> works fine for fetching mail, etc. The combination doesn't work.
>
> When I run my bash (tcsh also fails) script via Cron the wrong find is
> found. Instead of /usr/bin/find I get the windows version. My
> /etc/profile does prepend the directories, the permissions seen accurate
> - as per the other fixes that were in the archives.
>
> What did I miss?
>
> -Al
>
> --- Test script ---
> #!/usr/bin/bash
> [snip]

The regular invocation of bash is a non-login shell, and thus won't
execute /etc/profile.

Try changing the #! line to "#!/usr/bin/bash -l".  Be aware that you will
not be able to use a relative path either to invoke the script or inside
the script after that, as /etc/profile does a 'cd "$HOME"'.

Alternatively, you can add the following to the top of the script:

if ! shopt -q login_shell; then
  exec -l /bin/bash --login "$PWD/$0" "$PWD" "$@"
fi
cd "$1"
shift

The above should work even with relative paths, but I haven't tested it
extensively.
	Igor
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