crontab issue

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Helo .
I have 2.6.13-1.1526_FC4smp here.
I am trying to make crontab execute my simple shell script, but noting happens.

here is how i am testing this :

[oracle@dell ~]$ pwd
/home/oracle
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -l two*
ls: two*: No such file or directory
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ crontab -e
crontab: installing new crontab
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ crontab -l
30 16 * * 4  /home/oracle/go.sh
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ cat go.sh
one.txt > two.txt
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ cat one.txt
blabla
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ date
Thu Oct 29 16:26:58 CET 2009
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -l two*
ls: two*: No such file or directory
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ ps -ef | grep cron
root      2494     1  0 Oct16 ?        00:00:00 crond
oracle   27977 26405  0 16:27 pts/0    00:00:00 grep cron
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ date
Thu Oct 29 16:32:10 CET 2009
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -l two*
ls: two*: No such file or directory

I can't understand why this go.sh can't be executed. What am i doing wrong ?
Am i missing some permisions or what?
Thanks...

2

First: in your script, there's no shebang line, so the system won't know which interpreter to run it in
Second: in your script, you're trying to run a text file. If you want to just output the contents to a new file, use either cp or cat
Third: did you check the mails for user oracle? cron by default reports all output and error messages via mail to the user.
Fourth: is the executable bit set on your "script"?

3

Many issues here.
1) What are the permissions of go.sh and the rest of the files mentioned?

cd /home/oracle
ls -lad go.sh
ls -ald one.txt
ls -lad two.txt

2) The contents of "go.sh" make no sense and will give errors. It tries to execute a command called one.txt and put any output to STDOUT to file two.txt .
What is the script meant to do?

3) The error messages should be in unix mail for account oracle.

4

by shebang he means specify the shell in the first line of go.sh, such as
#!/bin/ksh
or else in your crontab line specify the shell: ksh go.sh
if you want to redirect the contents of a text file, just use the "cat" command:
cat one.txt > two.txt

5

Thank you all for your answers.
I did some modifications as per your suggestions, but the results are still negative.
Script still don't do what it should.

[oracle@dell ~]$ cat go.sh
#!/bin/bash
cp /home/oracle/one.txt /home/oracle/two.txt
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ crontab -l
46 8 * * 5  /home/oracle/go.sh
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ date
Fri Oct 30 08:43:57 CET 2009
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -lad go.sh
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle oinstall 57 Oct 30 08:43 go.sh
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -ald one.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle oinstall 7 Oct 29 16:17 one.txt
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -lad two.txt
ls: two.txt: No such file or directory
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ date
Fri Oct 30 08:53:40 CET 2009
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$
[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -l *.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle oinstall    7 Oct 29 16:17 one.txt
[oracle@dell ~]$ ps -ef | grep cron
root      2494     1  0 Oct16 ?        00:00:00 crond
oracle    5877 26405  0 08:55 pts/0    00:00:00 grep cron
[oracle@dell ~]$

can you please point me in the right direction ?
What did i missed here ?

6

Your problem is right here:

[oracle@dell ~]$ ls -lad go.sh
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle oinstall 57 Oct 30 08:43 go.sh

No executable bit set. Add that with chmod, and everything should be fine.

7

Thanks pludi , you are correct.
After i did chmod(744) , cp command created new file ,'two.txt' at the time it was specified in the crontab.

8

Glad you got it solved. Another angle you could have worked would be to run the script manually for your troubleshooting before scheduling in crontab. Always manually test before scheduling :slight_smile:

To help debug your script:
Try adding 'set -x' as the second line of your script and see what happens when you run it. An alternative, if you do not want to modify the script, would be to run 'bash -x /home/oracle.go.sh' or 'pdksh -x /home/oracle/go.sh'. This will give you some good debug output for any error conditions that may exist.