Hello expert,

What I want is to determine whether the script is called from CRON or it is executed interactively?

I tried the following but no luck:

#!/bin/ksh

cronID=`pgrep -x cron`
GPID=`ps -ef -o ppid,pid | grep " $PPID$" | awk '{print $1}'`

if [ "$cronID" == "$GPID" ]; then
echo I am being run through cron
else
echo I am NOT being run through cron
fi

There can be a lot of processes named cron. You are picking one at random and attempting to see if it's your parent. In your crontab entry do something that you won't do interactively. Like:
55 18 * * * /path/to/script runfromcron
Then just check $1.

This faster, easier, and you have a way to more easily test the script's operation.

How about checking those LOGIN specific environment variables from within the script? These variables are (check man page of the shell) such as $TERM, $PS1, etc.

Tom

While agreeing with the rest of your post on this (minor) issue I'd like to disagree: that depends on the system you're running on. AIX, for instance, has cron started in /etc/inittab with the "respawn" option and hence there is no need to start more than one cron processes. In my career as AIX administrator I have never seen mor than one cron process active (or any number of cron instances save 1, for that matter).

bakunin

crontab -e and look for the script.

I guess the real question is you want to
know whether your script is running interactively or not?
I do this for bash scripts:

How often have you looked for multiple cron processes? Would you notice a second cron if you simply ran a "ps -ef" but were looking for something else? I can't speak to AIX since I've never worked on it. But on other systems, cron runs programs by forking itself, fiddling with the environment, and then exec'ing the program to be run. After the fork, and prior to the exec you have a 2nd process named cron. Most people tend to not schedule jobs to be run at, say, exactly at 4 minutes after midnight. Instead everyone and his brother will tend to schedule stuff,say, exactly at midnight. At these busy points, you can have dozens of cron processes waiting to exec. I have often seen several cron processes on both HP-UX and Solaris. In addition, we have a monitoring system called Big Brother that used to check for for exactly one copy of cron running. I got dragged out of bed at 2 in the morning because cron forked and Big Bro freaked. Big Bro has now been corrected.

Also I do not really approve of running "ps -ef" and looking for processing by name. Users can write their own programs and they can call one of their own programs "cron". We just had a case where a developer wrote a program to be invoked from cron. And yes, he called the program to be invoked: cron. In the case of pgrep, "pgrep -u root -x cron" would at least avoid that, but the forking problem remains.