UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi guys, my first post time here, so hello to everyone

I've got a problem running one of my scripts at work. I can get crontab working on simple scripts (i.e. one that just outputs date to a temp file). but it won't correctly execute the script i want to use.

My script is a PHP script. It will log into different machines on the network, runs commands, then pipe the output to local files. This script works if executed manually, can't find any faults here. The script itself and the files it writes to have been set to +777 permissions.

The script calls a sub-script, which is an Expect script. I use this to SSH into the various machines on the network. It does not read/write to files. This script's permissions has been set to +777 as well. It runs correctly when manually executed.

Now when I set the crontab job to run, I know that it actually tries to call the script. This is because the call gets logged in the crontab logs (which is located in /var/log/cron). So it calls the script, but i'm not getting any output.

my crontab file looks something like this:

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/php /absolute/path/to/script.php
0 * * * * /absolute/path/to/script.php

The first line is intended to call the script every 10 minutes. The second line is intended to call the script every hour. They're both the same script (i've just been experimenting with syntax which is why the calls to the script are different).


Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your help, guys!

I'm not too familiar with PHP but I think it was:

Code:

php -f file.php

to execute a file?

PN

You should write a shell script that execute your php code...
And remember to set all the variables you need in that script including whole PATH to php...

Hi PN8830,

It might be a syntax issue that you're talking about. '/usr/bin/php /absolute/path/to/script.php' actually works if you type it in a console window. But i'll give the '-f' tag a try and see how it goes (day off today at work, woo hoo!).

To vbe,

Are you referring to defining environment variables inside the PHP script itself? what sort of variables should be defined in the script? As for the whole path to the script, i use a PHP command 'getcwd()' which fetches the absolute path to the script. And I append that to the start of any exec() call.
i.e.

Code:

$cwd = getcwd(); 
exec("$cwd/scriptName.php");

Doesn't the file have to be `chmod +x' 'ed to be PHP executable from the command line?

Regards.

Fixed!

After some debugging I found out that my Expect script was encountering errors which looked like
- "unknown terminal type"

I added the two following lines to my PHP script:

Code:

putenv('SHELL=/bin/bash');
 putenv('TERM=vt100');

That pretty much solved everything. Thanks very much to everyone for their help!