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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting How to determine if a script (perl) was called from a CRON job or commandline Post 302069209 by thestevew on Thursday 23rd of March 2006 09:47:19 AM
Old 03-23-2006
If your UNIX maintains a PPID variable in the environment then this will point to cron:

# echo $PPID
86838
# ps -fp 23266
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 23266 1 0 03 Jan - 1:37 /usr/sbin/cron

If not then (a lot looser), you could look at the TERM variable. THis is usually 'dumb' for cron whereas users will have a real terminal type; like vt220, wy50 etc.

cheers
 

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CRON(8) 						      System Manager's Manual							   CRON(8)

NAME
cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron) SYNOPSIS
cron DESCRIPTION
Cron should be started from /etc/rc or /etc/rc.local. It will return immediately, so you don't need to start it with '&'. Cron searches /var/spool/cron for crontab files which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory. Cron also searches for /etc/crontab and the files in the /etc/cron.d/ directory, which are in a different format (see crontab(5)). Cron then wakes up every minute, examining all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the current minute. When execut- ing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, if such exists). Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has, cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is modified. Note that the Crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab. SEE ALSO
crontab(1), crontab(5) AUTHOR
Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com> 4th Berkeley Distribution 20 December 1993 CRON(8)
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