Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm running OS 10.3.9 and am trying to get a cron job to work. When the hourly execution time rolls around the script doesn't run and I get an email from cron saying "/bin/bash: line 1: root: command not found". /bin/bash exists and /bin is included in the PATH. Anyone have any ideas what to try next?

Mike

Did you edit that script in Windows Notepad? It will be filled with carriage returns which will be taken as literal parts of strings...

No, I used crontab -e. I think the editor is vi.

I mean the script that cron is running.

The problem isn't with the script. I can comment out the script and get the same problem. The problem is that cron stops at the very first line that says "SHELL=/bin/bash" and returns the fact that it can't find bash.

Not all crons support the SHELL statement. Do you actually need the bash shell for your crontab?

Well, that was an interesting question. I tried commenting out the Path statement and now I get "/bin/sh: line 1: root: command not found". So apparently cron doesn't count the lines containing PATH, HOME, SHELL, etc. So now I can focus on the actual command as the problem.

When I first ran crontab -e I got a default file that looked like this:

Code:

# /etc/crontab
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
HOME=/var/log
#
#minute hour    mday    month   wday    who     command
#
#
# Run daily/weekly/monthly jobs.
00      *       *       *       *       root    periodic daily
30      4       *       *       6       root    periodic weekly
30      5       1       *       *       root    periodic monthly

When I couldn't get things to work I tried changing /bin/sh to /bin/bash since that's what Terminal seems to default to. I just read this on another forum:

"If the users account has a crontab but no useable shell in /etc/passwd then the cronjob will not run. You will have to give the account a shell for the crontab to run."

That sounds like my problem but I have no idea how to "give the account a shell".

Thoughts?

(And thanks, btw, for your help.)

Mike