Shell Programming and Scripting

I am not familiar with sar, but the observed discrepancy can be the result of a single missing field (field 2, the AM/PM field) shifting subsequent fields by -1.

The fields printed are 1, 2, 4, 6, 7. If the only difference is that the incorrect result's input is missing the AM/PM field, then its output translates to fields 1, 3, 5, 7, and 8 from the correct input. We don't know what 3, 5, and 8 look like. We do know that field 7 is iowait and it is shifted to the left by one as expected.

Again, I am not familiar with sar. I don't know what's going on. I'm just pointing out that this could be the result of column 2 being absent.

Some tools use different default formats for root than they do for unprivileged users. Perhaps this is one of them? Is the cronjob privileged while the manual runs are not?

Regards,
Alister

Hi Rudi C,

Thanks but even sourcing the .profile from absolute path didn't help resolve the issue when running the script through cron

I think there is something else that is missing when the script runs througn cron.

Whereas, manually running the same script gives the correct expected output

Any other suggestions please?

Thanks,
a1_win

alister made a very good point. Please modify the script to include all columns, and post output of manual and cron run. Do so by either getting rid of awk, or by printing $0 in awk. You may also want to print your locale settings for both runs.

Hi Alister/RudiC,

Thanks a lot for your time! Appreciate your help!

I was able to get the expected output after modifying the script and running through cron as below:

Code:

shell script:

cat sar_cpu.sh

#!/bin/bash


hdr=1
while true; do
  sar -u 10 1 |  awk '/user/{if(hdr){print $1,$3,$5,$6};next} /^[0-9]/{print $1,$3,$5,$6}'  OFS=, hdr=$hdr >> /sar_cpu_`date +%m%d%y`.csv
  sleep 5
  hdr=0
done

Regards,
a1_win