Need help with a cron job

maxheadroom

I've written this script to grab the mozilla source (with the firebird and thunderbird directories checked out) and make a tarball, and it works fine if I execute it from the command line, but if I try to crontab it it fails each time...

[PHP]
#!/bin/ksh

#Define Variables
TMPDIR="/tmp/maxheadsourcescript"
WEBDIR="$HOME/www/mozilla-source"

#Make Temp Directory and untar old source tree
mkdir $TMPDIR
cp $WEBDIR/latest-trunk/firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz $TMPDIR
cd $TMPDIR
tar -xzf firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz
rm -f firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz

#CVS Pull
cd $TMPDIR/mozilla
make -f client.mk checkout

#Get date / time and generate tarball
CVSTIME=`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M`
echo $CVSTIME
cd $TMPDIR
tar -czf firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz mozilla

#Make Directory in www
cd $WEBDIR
mkdir $CVSTIME-trunk

#Copy in tarball
cd $CVSTIME-trunk
cp $TMPDIR/firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz .
cp $TMPDIR/cvsco.log .
cd ..

#Link latest-trunk
rm -f $WEBDIR/latest-trunk
ln -s $CVSTIME-trunk latest-trunk

#Clean up temp files
rm -rf $TMPDIR

#CHMOD file to make workd viewable
cd $WEBDIR
chmod --recursive 755 latest-trunk
[/PHP]

This is the error mail from cron:

Your "cron" job on matrix
$HOME/sourcescript.sh

produced the following output:

tar: z: unknown option
Usage: tar {txruc}[vfbFXhiBDEelmopwnq[0-7]] [-k size] [tapefile] [blocksize] [exclude-file] [-I include-file] files ...
/home/maxhead/sourcescript.sh[15]: /tmp/maxheadsourcescript/mozilla:  not found
/home/maxhead/sourcescript.sh[16]: make:  not found
2003-12-05-12-03
tar: z: unknown option
Usage: tar {txruc}[vfbFXhiBDEelmopwnq[0-7]] [-k size] [tapefile] [blocksize] [exclude-file] [-I include-file] files ...
cp: cannot access /tmp/maxheadsourcescript/firebird-thunderbird-source.tar.gz
cp: cannot access /tmp/maxheadsourcescript/cvsco.log
chmod: WARNING: can't access 755
chmod: ERROR: invalid mode

I really can't understand what's wrong here, but I've never actually written a script and crontabbed it before so its possible that I'm missing something really obvious (tar seems to have a problem with the z option when cron runs the script?).

Typedef

maybe

zcat file.tar.gz | tar x

davej

The crontab uses the default shell to execute, which may have different paths set than your normal a/c. So cron could be running a different version of tar that doesn't support the 'z' option. Eg the default tar that comes with Solaris doesn't support it.

Try to specifiy the full path to tar in your script....

("which tar" will tell you the path)


davej

maxheadroom

dave,

Thanks for that - hit the nail right on the head. I used the full path to tar, then CVS started complaining so I just got lazy and redefined the PATH variable within the script...