Identifying cron jobs

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Sometimes it is necessary to run a job in the foreground that would normally be run as an overnight cron job.
When the job is run in the foreground, slightly different code may be required. Rather than having two scripts, I thought of following:

#!/bin/ksh                            
TTY=$(tty)                            
if [ "a$TTY" = "anot a tty" ]         
then  
        CRON="YES"                                
        echo cron job                 
else                        
        CRON="NO"          
        echo terminal session at $TTY 
fi

Can anybody foresee where this code may fail?

2

If your script is invoked with standard input redirected from a file other than a TTY device or if the script is invoked in a pipeline (other than as the 1st command in the pipeline), the code will indicate that it is running as a cron job.

3

I usually do this in ksh :

if [ -t 0 ] ; then
   inputTERM=1
fi;
1 Like
4

I decided on a different approach.

#!/bin/ksh                                                 
ps -ef |grep /etc/cron                                     
ps -ef |grep etc/cron|read user cronpid discard            
echo  /etc/cron is $cronpid                                
ps -ef |grep $cronpid |grep $0|read user startpid discard  
echo startpid is $startpid                                 
if [ "a$startpid" = "a" ]                                  
then                                                       
        echo is not a cron job                             
        exit 1                                             
fi                                                         
echo $0                                                    
pid=$$                                                     
echo  my process is $0 pid $pid                            
ps -ef |grep $0 |grep $startpid                            
ps -ef |grep $0 |grep $startpid|read user pid1 discard     
echo $pid $pid1 should be same                             
if [ $pid -eq $pid1 ]                                      
then                                                       
        echo is cron job                                   
else                                                       
        echo is not cron job                               
fi

I left some lines in from debugging.