UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

am running a cron job to do a backup of all user files. the script runs properly in the terminal but only backups about 20% of the files when run by cron.

the Linux system is running BASH as far as I can tell.

the symbols $FILE and $DIRECTORY are defined properly and the following is the active line which causes the backup to occur:

NAME=userName;
#
DIRECTORY=~/$NAME;
FILE=$DIRECTORY/`date '+%y%m%d%H%M%S'`_$NAME.tar;
#
tar -cvf $FILE $DIRECTORY/html;

what do I need to do to get cron to create a tarball of all the files?

If you direct (as most people do) the stderr and stdout to /dev/null in the crontab file, remove this, then check your mail to see what, if any error you receive.

zum Beispiel:

0 0 * * * myJob > /dev/null 2>&1

(remove the "> /dev/null 2>&1" part)

i.e. standard ourput and standard error goes to the mailbox of the owner of the job (unless you throw it away to /dev/null). This is usually a good place to look for why the job did not finish as you expected.

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by "check your mail" I mean (logged in as the user who starts the job) run "mail". You should see something like "cronjob .... produced the following output" (or some such)