I have a command that is found in /usr/ud51/bin called stopudt which safely stops idle database users (let's writes finish, etc).

If I login as root and issue stopudt [PID] the process is stopped.
I put a script in cron to run it and it says stopudt not found.

/usr/ud51/bin is in root's PATH. What other 'user' PATH do I need to modify... Or is that PATH the problem at all?

Thanks for any help!

IIRC, cron jobs run under the users logon.

What OS are you running and how did you enter the command into crontab?

The reason I ask is that on one of my OpenBSD systems I use the `crontab -e` command to edit the crontab associated with the user that I am logged on as. This entry is saved in the /var/cron/tabs sub-dir under the users name to be read and executed from the cron daemon.

It sounds like your cron job is not executing as root and since the /usr/ud51/bin is in the root's path (and chances are, not in any of the other users path) it is being reported as not found.

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michieka,

If you could post part of your script, I think the problem is in there.

If you have ROOT, any script should run from there if it is in the PATH OR if you give the full path in cron or on the command line, which I always do to avoid problems with trojans and such.

I see that you have the PID number as well from the commandline "/usr/ud51/bin/stopudt. How do you capture that from a script?

Also, try creating a cron as that user. su - username then create a crontab as that user and execute it. See what you get from that.

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I'm user chenly, and I run cron. I schedule ftp updates, web page modifications, everything... ;-)

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man: no entry for woman in the manual.

Running AIX 4.33. This is the script. I had to put some environment variables in there, but simply putting the PATH probably would have worked as well. Using sed and awk to get the PID numbers from who -u...

#!/usr/bin/ksh
#
# Logs users out that have been idle for 20 or more minutes.


UDTBIN=/usr/ud51/bin
UDTHOME=/usr/ud51

export UDTBIN
export UDTHOME


/usr/ud51/bin/stopudt `who -u | sed -e "s/\./0/" -e "s/://g" | awk '$6 > 20 {print $7}'`

How do I change who the default email goes to from cron jobs. I know it goes to the user by default. The man pages say I can use the mailto command, but I don't seem to have that on my system. AIX 4.33. How do you do it on yours?

You can redirect mail in a couple of ways. You can either use /etc/aliases for sendmail. or you can simply put a .forward in the user's home directory owned by root. Make the permissions 755.

/etc/aliases is a more efficient way to do it, but requires you to create a group and an alias name for the user. It works fine, but the simplest way is to use the .forward in that user home dir.

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