UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm sure there's something I'm simply not grasping, but I have a third-party utility (TPU) that needs to run in cron. This utility displays it's output in several formats, depending on the TERM value. cron has no TERM value by default, which results in the TPU dying with an error Sorry, I don't know anything about your "unknown" terminal.

So, I attempted to fix that by setting a value to TERM prior to the call to the TPU.

TERM=xterm;thirdPartyProduct

However, this dies with the same error. Does this mean that I'm using incorrect syntax to set and retain the TERM value? Anyone have any idea what I can do in order to pass a known term value to the TPU?


TIA.

A program running under cron is not going to have a terminal at all. It is correct for TERM to not be set. Where do you expect the output to go? Setting TERM is probably a very bad idea. But if you must try that, the syntax varies with shell. Maybe this...

TERM=something; export TERM; /some/program

I agree setting TERM in cron is not a good idea. I think I found an alternative solution - there appears to be an optional parm for the TPU that "dumbs down" the output to plain text. That looks like it avoids the TERM emulation issue.


Thanks.