What are the rules of calling shell scripts in cron.

How do I go about setting up the correct PATHS that calls a script, which then calls another sub script all of which has to retain the orginal PATHS and VARS that I've set up in first script

Confused..

ok
Well Cron calls a script called script.cron - This script contains environment setups etc, and then calls another script script2.ksh

I want the script2.ksh to retain all the environments etc that was set in script.cron

What you have should work. I have the same setup.
I kick off a script, say, first.sh which contains all the necessary paths, variables, etc and this first.sh script kicks off the next one which kicks off the next one, etc.

crontab:

00 22 * * 1-5 ksh $HOME/bin/first.sh > $HOME/log/first.log 2>&1

This has been working for as long as I can remember and I think you are on the right track.

first.sh scripts:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$SQLDIR/bin:$HOME/bin
USERID=user01
PW=mypasswd
LOGFILE=$HOME/log/logfile.log
LIBPATH=...whatever
etc

. $HOME/bin/second.sh

you get the idea.

You need to use the "export" command in the first script to put a variable in the environment. The second script will inherit the environment from its parent.

The other thing worth mentioning is that a cron script must be self-sufficient. Don't depend on setup stuff from .profile. So set variables like PATH in the script. Don't rely on the the PATH you inherit from cron.

I suppose you can use 'export' but my first.sh script doesn't have it and my 100 or so scripts that come after runs fine.

Also, isn't there a limit to how many processes you can chain together? After a certain amount of this type of call:

. $HOME/bin/twenty.sh

I have to do this:

ksh $HOME/bin/twentyone.sh

for recursive issues?? otherwise I get an error...Do you know why? Not sure of the exact count but to be safe I remember to use explicit calls intermittently after so many implicit calls. Don't go overboard with 'ksh' too though.