Shell Programming and Scripting

So I have found the issue but have no idea how to fix it!

When running from the crontab the output of any command is chopped to a certain length, so the grep on the PS command can not find what it is looking for as the 'uniqueness' of the string is past the chop off point.

I guess this is something to do with the terminal env for the cron.

Does anyone know how I can change that?

Code:

EXAMPLE FROM CRON...

5231 root      345m S    /var/packages/sab2/target/utils/bin/python /volume1/

EXAMPLE FROM COMMAND LINE PS

5231 root      187m S    /var/packages/sab2/target/utils/bin/python /volume1/@appstore/sickbeard/SickBeard.py --quiet

you can try executing the .profile of the corresponding user before the script in the cron entry and try.

Code:

0 19 * * 2 /home/myuser/.profile; /home/myuser/bin/garbage-day-email.sh

Time to look at "man ps" on your computer. There's too much variety in the syntax for "ps" to guess accurately but "ps -w" (wide) is one guess.

Hi,

I'm afraid as this is running Busy Box it does not have man. And I'm pretty confident it is nothing to do with the actual ps command. It will use the -w command as default. No difference if I include that in the script as an argument.

The issue is around cron not running in an env set terminal.

I tried the

Code:

0 19 * * 2 /home/myuser/.profile; /home/myuser/bin/garbage-day-email.sh

in the crontab with no joy.

It still cuts the output off at 78 characters.

Maybe Busy Box will just not allow it and I'll have to come up with a more intuitive way of checking the process

Try using -ww ... some versions of the ps command define this as:

-w Wide output. Use this option twice for unlimited width.


The 78 character width is sneakily suspicious to standard tty width.
Why are you so confident it is not the ps command?
My hypothesis of the problem would be the ps command cannot identify the output terminal and so it is defaulting to the default tty settings.

In your script, try experimenting also with the 'tty' command. This will either correct your problem or give you better insight.

Try this way. Make a startup script that will start the actual process and stores the PID in a text file.

Later in the cron script you may check for the PID which stored in the text file.

But the problem with this is, when the program crashes and the PID stored in the text file will be reused. And we may end up saying yes for the wrong process.

So check for the possibilities of process crash.

PID text file must be removed when the process stops.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a play around this weekend.