Not having much luck Googling this question and I thought about posting it on SF, but it actually seems like a development question. If not, please feel free to migrate.
So, I have a script that runs via cron every morning at about 3 am. I also run the same scripts manually sometimes. The problem is that every time I run my script manually and it fails, it sends me an e-mail; even though I can look at the output and view the error in the console.
Is there a way for the bash script to tell that it's being run through cron (perhaps by using whoami) and only send the e-mail if so? I'd love to stop receiving emails when I'm doing my testing...
you can try "tty" to see if it's run by a terminal or not. that won't tell you that it's specifically run by cron, but you can tell if its "not a user as a prompt".
you can also get your parent-pid and follow it up the tree to look for cron, though that's a little heavy-handed.
I had a similar issue. I solved it with checking if stdout was a TTY. This is a check to see if you script runs in interactive mode:
if [ -t 1 ] ; then
echo "interacive mode";
else
#send mail
fi
I got this from: How to detect if my shell script is running through a pipe?
The -t test return true if file descriptor is open and refers to a terminal. '1' is stdout.
Here's two different options for you:
Take the emailing out of your script/program and let cron handle it. If you set the MAILTO variable in your crontab, cron will send anything printed out to that email address. eg:
MAILTO=youremail#example.com
# run five minutes after midnight, every day
5 0 * * * $HOME/bin/daily.job
Set an environment variable in your crontab that is used to determine if running under cron. eg:
THIS_IS_CRON=1
# run five minutes after midnight, every day
5 0 * * * $HOME/bin/daily.job
and in your script something like
if [ -n "$THIS_IS_CRON" ]; then echo "I'm running in cron"; else echo "I'm not running in cron"; fi
Why not have a command line argument that is -t for testing or -c for cron.
Or better yet:
-e=email#address.com
If it's not specified, don't send an email.
I know the question is old, but I just came across the same problem. This was my solution:
CRON=$(pstree -s $$ | grep -q cron && echo true || echo false)
then test with
if $CRON
then
echo "Being run by cron"
else
echo "Not being run by cron"
fi
same idea as the one that #eruciform mentioned - follows your PID up the process tree checking for cron.
Note: This solution only works specifically for cron, unlike some of the other solutions, which work anytime the script is being run non-interactively.
What works for me is to check $TERM. Under cron it's "dumb" but under a shell it's something else. Use the set command in your terminal, then in a cron-script and check it out
if [ "dumb" == "$TERM" ]
then
echo "cron"
else
echo "term"
fi
I'd like to suggest a new answer to this highly-voted question. This works only on systemd systems with loginctl (e.g. Ubuntu 14.10+, RHEL/CentOS 7+) but is able to give a much more authoritative answer than previously presented solutions.
service=$(loginctl --property=Service show-session $(</proc/self/sessionid))
if [[ ${service#*=} == 'crond' ]]; then
echo "running in cron"
fi
To summarize: when used with systemd, crond (like sshd and others) creates a new session when it starts a job for a user. This session has an ID that is unique for the entire uptime of the machine. Each session has some properties, one of which is the name of the service that started it. loginctl can tell us the value of this property, which will be "crond" if and only if the session was actually started by crond.
Advantages over using environment variables:
No need to modify cron entries to add special invocations or environment variables
No possibility of an intermediate process modifying environment variables to create a false positive or false negative
Advantages over testing for tty:
No false positives in pipelines, startup scripts, etc
Advantages over checking the process tree:
No false positives from processes that also have crond in their name
No false negatives if the script is disowned
Many of the commands used in prior posts are not available on every system (pstree, loginctl, tty). This was the only thing that worked for me on a ten years old BusyBox/OpenWrt router that I'm currently using as a blacklist DNS server. It runs a script with an auto-update feature. Running from crontab, it sends an email out.
[ -z "$TERM" ] || [ "$TERM" = "dumb" ] && echo 'Crontab' || echo 'Interactive'
In an interactive shell the $TERM-variable returns the value vt102 for me. I included the check for "dumb" since #edoceo mentioned it worked for him. I didn't use '==' since it's not completely portable.
I also liked the idea from Tal, but also see the risk of having undefined returns. I ended up with a slightly modified version, which seems to work very smooth in my opinion:
CRON="$( pstree -s $$ | grep -c cron )"
So you can check for $CRON being 1 or 0 at any time.
Related
am writing a crontab script, which will run on each Saturday for every 15minutes. The idea is to validate an external api status =SUCCESS or not. If its success, then the cronjob for the day should not trigger any more.
Right now am trying with recursion, but I dont think so that is a best solution.
Is there any other solution to achieve this? am using Shell script to invoke api.
Here is the existing snippet:
Cronjob:
*/15 * * * 6 validate.sh
script:
status='curl -X GET "api"'
if [[ $status == "SUCCEEDED" ]];then
trigger email
else sleep 180
./validate.sh
fi
Add another cron job so it removes the flag file on Friday evening, before the other job starts running:
59 23 * * 5 rm .succeeded.txt
Then change your script so it aborts if this file exists, and creates it when it succeeds.
#!/bin/bash
test -e .succeeded.txt && exit
if [[ $(curl -X GET "api") == "SUCCEEDED" ]];then
trigger email
touch .succeeded.txt
fi
I tried to fix other errors in your script, too, but I had to guess many things. This assumes "SUCCEEDED" is the sole output from curl when the GET works.
Putting the command in a variable is a useless complication which makes your script longer and (very slightly) slower, but in addition, it creates problems of its own when the command contains embedded quotes; see e.g. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/050
... But of course, presumably you wanted to actually run the command. Your attempt would merely check whether the string in the variable was equal to "SUCEEDED" which of course it would never be.
Another problem was that you were spawning multiple validate.sh jobs, each of which would recurse and retry. You want one or the other, not both. I went with keeping your schedule and just trying once in each job.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this but I can't. I wanted to make a cron that checks a process is up. If so, write to a file that it is up. Else, use this script to start it again, and log the fact that it was dead.
Here's what I came up with:
pgrep -f app -u silv && echo "$(date) app is online" >> /home/silv/app_status || echo "$(date) app is dead" >> /home/silv/app_status && /home/silv/apps/app/bin/start-app.sh
If the app is up, it writes correctly in the log file, that it's online.
If the app is not up, it still writes that it is online BUT also start's the app.
What am I missing?
Turns out I didn't understand how '&&' and '||' actually work in Bash.
This answer explains it, the gist being that both AND and OR operators have the same precedence in BASH
How do I avoid cronjob from executing multiple times on the same command? I had tried to look around and try to check and kill in processes but it doesn't work with the below code. With the below code it keeps entering into else condition where it suppose to be "running". Any idea which part I did it wrongly?
#!/bin/sh
devPath=`ps aux | grep "[i]mport_shell_script"` | xargs
if [ ! -z "$devPath" -a "$devPath" != " " ]; then
echo "running"
exit
else
while true
do
sudo /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/xxx/import_from_datafile.php /dev/null 2>&1
sleep 5
done
fi
exit
cronjob:
*/2 * * * * root /bin/sh /var/www/html/xxx/import_shell_script.sh /dev/null 2>&1
I don't see the point to add a cron job which then starts a loop that runs a job. Either use cron to run the job every minute or use a daemon script to make sure your service is started and is kept running.
To check whether your script is already running, you can use a lock directory (unless your daemon framework already does that for you):
LOCK=/tmp/script.lock # You may want a better name here
mkdir $LOCK || exit 1 # Exit with error if script is already running
trap "rmdir $LOCK" EXIT # Remove the lock when the script terminates
...normal code...
If your OS supports it, then /var/lock/script might be a better path.
Your next question is probably how to write a daemon. To answer that, I need to know what kind of Linux you're using and whether you have things like systemd, daemonize, etc.
check the presence of a file at the beginning of your script ( for example /tmp/runonce-import_shell_script ). If it exists, that means the same script is already running (or the previous one halted with an error).
You can also add a timestamp in that file so you can check since when the script was running (and maybe decide to run it again after 24h even if the file is present)
I am running Ubuntu 11.10 (Unity interface) and I created a Bash script that uses 'gnome-open' to open a series of web pages I use every morning. When I manually execute the script in the Terminal, the bash script works just fine. Here's a sample of the script (it's all the same so I've shortened it):
#!/bin/bash
gnome-open 'https://docs.google.com';
gnome-open 'https://mail.google.com';
Since it seemed to be working well, I added a job to my crontab (mine, not root's) to execute every weekday at a specific time.
Here's the crontab entry:
30 10 * * 1,2,3,4,5 ~/bin/webcheck.sh
The problem is this error gets returned for every single 'gnome-open' command in the bash script:
GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
GConf Error: No D-BUS daemon running
Error: no display specified
I did some searching to try and figure this out. The first thing I tried was relaunching the daemon using SIGHUP:
killall -s SIGHUP gconfd-2
That didn't work so I tried launching the dbus-daemon using this code from the manpage for dbus-launch:
## test for an existing bus daemon, just to be safe
if test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ; then
## if not found, launch a new one
eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session`
echo "D-Bus per-session daemon address is: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"
fi
But that didn't do anything.
I tried adding simply 'dbus-launch' at the top of my bash script and that didn't work either.
I also tried editing the crontab to include the path to Bash, because I saw that suggestion on another thread but that didn't work.
Any ideas on how I can get this up and running?
Here is how the problem was solved. It turns out the issue was primarily caused by Bash not having access to an X window session (or at least that's how I understood it). So my problem was solved by editing my crontab like so:
30 10 * * 1,2,3,4,5 export DISPLAY=:0 && ~/bin/webcheck.sh
The "export DISPLAY=:0" statement told cron which display to use. I found the answer on this archived Ubuntu forum after searching for "no display specified" or something like that:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-105250.html
So now, whenever I'm logged in, exactly at 10:30 my system will automatically launch a series of webpages that I need to look at every day. Saves me having to go through the arduous process of typing in my three-letter alias every time :)
Glad you asked!
It depends on when it is run.
If the Gnome GDM Greeter is live, you can use the DBUS session from the logon dialog, if you will. You can, e.g., use this to send notifications to the logon screen, if no-one is logged in:
function do_notification
{
for pid in $(pgrep gnome-session); do
unset COOKIE
COOKIE="$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/$pid/environ|cut -d= -f2-)"
GNUSER="$(ps --no-heading -o uname $pid)"
echo "Notifying user $GNUSER (gnome-session $pid) with '$#'"
sudo -u "$GNUSER" DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="$COOKIE" /usr/bin/notify-send -c "From CRON:" "$#"
done
unset COOKIE
}
As you can see the above code simply runs the same command (notify-send) on all available gnome-sessions, when called like:
do_notification "I wanted to let you guys know"
You can probably pick this apart and put it to use for your own purposes.
I am a novice at Bash scripting but I'm a quick learner. Usually. I'm trying to write a script to kill and restart an instance of Hudson--it needs to be restarted to pick up changes in environment variables. What I have so far:
#!/bin/bash
h=`pgrep -f hudson`
if test "$h" != ""; then
kill $h
while [ "$h" != "" ]; do
sleep 1
unset h
h=`pgrep -f hudson`
done
fi
java -jar ~/hudson/hudson.war &
The script correctly determines the running Hudson instance's PID and kills it. However, it just waits after the "kill" line and doesn't proceed. If I hit a key there it completes killing the process and exits the script, never even getting to the while loop. Clearly I'm missing something about how the process should be killed. It's not that the Hudson process is hung and not responding to "kill"; it exits normally, just not until I intervene.
I'm also sure this could be much more efficient but right now I would just like to understand where I'm going wrong.
Thanks in advance.
This represents some straightforward improvements to your script:
#!/bin/bash
h=$(pgrep -f hudson) # $() is preferred over backticks
if [[ -n $h ]]; then # this checks whether a variable is non-empty
kill $h
while [[ -n $h ]]; do
sleep 1
h=$(pgrep -f hudson) # it's usually unnecessary to unset a variable before you set it
done
fi
java -jar ~/hudson/hudson.war &
However, it's likely that this is all you need (or use the provided facility that mrooney referred to):
while pkill hudson; do sleep 1; done
java -jar ~/hudson/hudson.war &
How about being nice to Hudson and let it shut down itself. I found the following statement in the Hudson forum:
I added http://server/hudson/exit to
1.161. Accessing this URL will shutdown the VM that runs Hudson.
You can call the URL with wget. You can still kill Hudson if it doesn't shut down in an appropriate time.
EDIT: I just stumbled over another thread, with interesting restart options. It uses commands of the build in Winstone server. Not sure if it will pick up changes to environment variables.
If you are using Hudson via an RPM, it comes with an init script already. If not, I'd take a look at them and see if you can base your script off of them: https://hudson.dev.java.net/svn/hudson/trunk/hudson/main/rpm/SOURCES/ (guest//guest).