UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a script that runs a SQL query and then emails me the results. It runs correctly alone. I am trying to set up a cron that will run the script every day at say 5:00. When the script runs alone, the results are emailed exactly like I want the, but when I set up a cronjob, I get a blank email. with the subject indicated in the script.
The script is owned by the correct user and the cron is set in the users crontab. I accessed it my using crontab -e. Is there any reason the cron would cause the script to not email me the same results as just running the script alone??
Thanks!

be sure to use the full path for any commands you are using. The users profile is not loaded when cron is run so if you stored any variables in there it would not be set at run time.

Excuse my ignorance, I am very noob!
Here is my cron.

Code:

10 15 * * * /u01/prod/prodcomn/admin/scripts/specialrequests/icat_request/icat_export.sh PROD

So are you saying I perhaps need to add my user at the start of the cron?

Code:

10 15 * * * applprod /u01/prod/prodcomn/admin/scripts/specialrequests/icat_request/icat_export.sh PROD

applprod is obviously my user.

Thanks so much!

We're talking about paths inside your script, not in the crontab file. The PATH given by cron is very minimal and may not use all the commands you use if any are outside of the very basic /bin/ and so forth.

Is your script giving any output? If yes and that output is not required, redirect that to /dev/null.

Make sure you are not using any server global variables in the script. They won't be available untill someone logs in.

Load your .profile into the script at the beginning.

Such as this:

HOME=/dst/home/nikudev # This should be the location of your .profile file
export HOME

. $HOME/.profile

Thank you for the responces. Here is my script. The script works and the result is a SQL query being emailed to me. I DO need that result.

Code:

    SID=$1
  DIR=/u01/prod/prodcomn/admin/scripts/specialrequests/export_icat.sql
  ORACLE_SID=$SID; export ORACLE_SID
  PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH; export PATH
  cd $DIR
  sqlplus user/pwd @export_icat.sql > export_icat.csv
  mail -s "Results" email@domain < export_icat.csv
  mv export_icat.csv "`date +%m%d%Y`_export_icat.csv

export_icat is the sql query that is called to run by the script. The result of the query is saved to export_icat.csv. That file is then emailed to me.

So I should be indicating my user profile at the start of my script?
Thanks!