UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to schedule a job to run through cron that checks for high CPU usage. The 'top' command is run and the output is logged to a file. A calculation is done in the file to check if CPU runs above 80%. If this happens an email is sent out.

The problem I am having is that when I run this manually from the command prompt is runs fine. When I run it through cron it doesn't output teh results of the 'top' commnad to the file. Does anybody know why this would happen? The script uses awk commands as well. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks

post how you are running top and a bit of the script.
should be something simple.

Jobs from cron do not have the same envrionment as it runs in a command shell, this causes mostly the problem you describe.

A way to fix, load your personel .profile in the cronjob script

#!/bin/csh
~x/.profile # Where x=username

...
...
awk
...

exit # End of script

Here is part of the script. I tried to execute the .profile within the script but its not working. I think my command may be wrong. I'm using KornShell, do you know what the correct command for executing the .profile with a KornShell script is?

Name=`uname -n`
TEXT=`echo 'Running TOP command on' $Name '\r'`
echo $Name
echo $TEXT
date > toplst.out
top >> toplst.out
REP_FILE=`grep '%' toplst.out | awk '{print $1,$10,$11,"\r"}'`
OUTPUT=`grep "%" toplst.out | awk 'BEGIN{ print }
{
sum += substr($10,1,4)
}
END {
if (sum > 80)
{

I would try running top with these options.

top -h -s 1 -d 1 > filename.out

This will give you the top output with no CPU data (-h) if you have 8/16 or more like I do with HP. Also, this will give you a 1 second (-s 1) snapshot and quit after 1 iteration the top (-d 1).


I had the same problem running a cronjob with glance on HPUX which prints to the console an active screen.