Several people have had this problem, but none of the fixes mentioned around the net have worked for me.
I have a simple shell script that copies log files from a few directories, and puts them in one single directory on a remote machine. The script works fine.
I then create a cronjob, which doesnt seem to execute. My crontab looks like:
1 * * * * /bin/bash /home/user/myscripts/getlogs.sh > /tmp/cronscript.out 2>&1
/var/log/cron shows this every minute
Aug 20 17:02:01 hostname crond[2614]: (root) RELOAD (/var/spool/cron/root)
so it cron job executes, but it doesnt seem to run the shell script.
Related
I'm running Windows 10 x64 with WSL2 (Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2).
In WSL2, I have cron running the following task:
* * * * * /mnt/c/Users/Colin/Desktop/test.sh
The contents of test.sh (currently executing every minute for test purposes) are as follows:
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/usr/lib/wsl/lib:/mnt/c/Windows/system32:/mnt/c/Windows:/mnt/c/Windows/System32
taskkill.exe /im calibre.exe
sleep 5
<rsync command here>
echo "Done with rsync, launching calibre..."
screen -dm bash -c \"/mnt/c/Users/Colin/Desktop/startcalibre.sh\"
This script works perfectly when executed from the WSL2 prompt.
However, cron will not run either the taskkill.exe command nor the screen command (which launches calibre) in the script. I do see that cron executes the script because I see that rsync runs since I can see that in Wireshark. It seems that cron on WSL2 has problems with running Windows executables (taskkill.exe, etc) in particular (I can't even seem to get notepad.exe to launch via a cron-executed script).
What should I add to the script to get cron to execute Windows executables?
Not necessarily an answer, but I'm hoping this will lead us to one ...
First, let's try a script that pretty much anyone with WSL can run to see if we can reproduce the problem in more of an MRE:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/usr/lib/wsl/lib:/mnt/c/Windows/system32:/mnt/c/Windows:/mnt/c/Windows/System32
echo $PATH > ~/cronlogger
notepad.exe &
sleep 2
which taskkill.exe >> ~/cronlogger
taskkill.exe /im notepad.exe >> ~/cronlogger 2>&1
I placed this script in my %userprofile%/Desktop/test.sh as well and set it to run with the same crontab line (via sudo crontab -u ntd -e):
* * * * * /mnt/c/Users/ntd/Desktop/test.sh
It works for me as expected -- Every minute, Notepad pops up and then after 2 seconds is killed. The contents of ~/cronlogger are:
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/usr/lib/wsl/lib:/mnt/c/Windows/system32:/mnt/c/Windows:/mnt/c/Windows/System32
/mnt/c/Windows/system32/taskkill.exe
SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "Notepad.exe" with PID 4268.
Of course, wait until a few seconds after the top of the minute to make sure you capture the whole thing.
I notice that you have the ..\System32 path twice, but that shouldn't matter. Also, case-sensitivity isn't an issue unless you have specifically turned it on for Windows drives via /etc/wsl.conf.
I tested this:
On Windows 10 21H2
On Windows 11 using the latest Preview version of WSL
As my normal user sudo crontab -u ntd -e
As the root user sudo crontab -e
All worked okay for me.
At this point, the only thing I can think that might throw it off is if you were using a Systemd script of some sort. I've seen Systemd throw off the WSL binfmt_misc registration so that WSL can no longer run Windows executables. I could imagine this could happen inside the Cron daemon (but still be working via the default shell).
I wan to create cron job that runs a shell script every minute I've tried editing contrab -e with:
1 * * * * sh ~/test.sh
to no avail
I recommend using: https://crontab.guru/
This is a really insightful way to create and understand cron jobs.
This should trigger every minute. However, when a cron runs it can run as a different user and that script location might be different. Adding a log file might help you track down what is going on.
* * * * * /bin/sh /home/user/test.sh >> /var/log/myjob.log 2>&1
The cron job used to working well and suddenly stopped working
1 * * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/roy/update.py
It can still run manually on the command line.
Then I tried to debug it by the following command:
/usr/bin/python3 /home/roy/update.py 2>&1 >> /home/roy/cron_error_report.txt
There is no error shown in the cron_error_report.txt either.
Can anybody help me?
Make sure cron is running
sudo service cron status
I hope my answer can help others. It really take a long time to figure it out.
I moved a file used for my current python program to a shared folder. I exported the shared folder to PYTHONPATH.
So there is no problem while I run the script in the command line. However, cron could not run it. So I have to move the file back to my current folder and the cron starts to work again.
I am on shared hosting and I'm trying to schedule cronjob to run every now and then. Via cPanel I scheduled to execute my script but even though that according to my host support the cronjob runs, the script doesn't seem as doing anything. The cron job command I set via cPanel is:
/bin/sh /home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh
and the cronjob2.sh
#!/bin/bash
/home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/node_modules/forever/bin/forever stop 0
when via SSH I execute:
/home1/myusername/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh
it stops forever process as needed. From cronjob doesn't do anything.
How can I get this working?
EDIT:
So I've tried:
/bin/sh /home1/username/public_html/somefolder/cronjob2.sh >> /tmp/mylog 2>&1
and mylog entries say:
/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory
It seems that forever needs to run node and this cannot be found. How would I possibly fix this?
EDIT2:
Accepted answer at superuser.com. Thank you all for help
https://superuser.com/questions/763261/simple-script-run-via-cronjob-doesnt-work-but-works-from-shell/763288#763288
For cron job lines in a crontab it's not required to specify kind of shell or e.g. of perl.
It's enough, that your script contains
shebang
line.
Therefore you should remove /bin/sh from your cron job line.
Another aspect, that might cause a different behavior of your script by interactive start and by cron daemon start is possible different environment, first of all the PATH variable. Therefore check, if you script is able to be executed in very restricted environment, that is provided by cron daemon. You can determine your cron job environment experimentally by start of temporary cron job, that executes "env" command and writes its output to a file.
Once more aspect: Have you redirected STDOUT and STDERR of the cron job to a log file and read its content to analyze the issue? You can do it as follows:
your_cron_job >/tmp/any_name.log 2>&1
According to what you wrote, when you run your script via SSH, you are using bash, because this line is the first of your script:
#!/bin/bash
However, in the crontab, you are forcing the use of sh instead of bash. Are you sure your script is fully compatible with sh? Otherwise, simply replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash in your cron command and test again.
I have created a cron job to start and stop instance at particular times.
I have set up amazon APIs against user ubuntu. saved script start.sh in home folder
#!/bin/bash
ec2-start-instances i-instanceID
I placed the job in cron tab.
0 18 * * 5 /home/ubuntu/scripts/dev/stop.sh
The script is exicuiting on specific times but the instances are not stopping/starting.
Can anyone suggest a way out.
I also tried setting up the same job in root user that also failed
You need to define which binary is executing the script. Hence, try with this:
0 18 * * 5 /bin/bash /home/ubuntu/scripts/dev/stop.sh
^^^^^^^^^