Hello all,

I want to call my users .profile in cron?

I understand that i have to do it explicitly in crontab entry.

How can we do it ? How can i write a simple script calling it?

Thanks & Regards
Abhijeet

. $HOME/.profile

-Mike

How is the .profile file comes into play when we run a scripts ?

It doesn't... the .profile is read only by a login shell, not every time a shell script is run.

When you login, since your .profile is read, you have certain things set up for you- like your $PATH. If those things are in environment variables (that is, if they've been exported), then scripts will have access to those things. Again, a good example is the $PATH. However, when cron runs a script the .profile is not read. This causes problems when you write scripts because things work when you run them but not when cron runs them.

So you need to always check your assumptions when doing shell programming... things like "What directory does the shell script think it's in?" and "What PATH does the shell script require?"
-Mike

Hi

Here is a line from my crontab:

10 4 * * * . ~/.profile; ${SCRIPTS}/backup_mysql.sh >> ${BACKUPS_LOG}/${HOSTNAME}_mysql_v${VERS}.script.log 2>&1

For the scripts that I've written, I execute the .profile within the script - not in cron.

hence, in the script ${SCRIPTS}/backup_mysql.sh, you would see ...

#!/usr/bin/ksh
...
#- Ensure User Environment Set -#
. ${HOME}/.profile
...
[rest of script]

Caveat Programmer: . ~/.profile MAY work- for example, if you are in Linux, where sh is the same as bash. However, for Solaris and other UNICES, sh is the bourne shell and will not recognize the ~ (tilde) metacharacter.

For them, you must use

. $HOME/.profile