Cron jobs on Sun Solaris 5.10

Question

Hi,
Following are the details of my Sun box:
SunOS ocmdf2 5.10 Generic_118833-33 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V490
I am trying to set up cron job entries using the crontab file. I have copied over my crontab file from the HP-UX machine over to this Sun machine.
I have registered the file with the cron system by running the "crontab crontab.txt" command where contab.txt contains all my cron job entries. After doing so, I noticed that non of the cron jobs are getting executed. One of the cron job is given below for reference:
0 6 * * 2,3,4,5,6 . /usr/local/bin/all_roots > /dev/null 2>&1 ; ksh $TF_FEED_SRC/generate_feed_contents.com standard_feed > $TF_FEED_LOG/standard_feed.cron.log 2>&1
The above cron job entry runs fine on the HP-UX machine, but not on the Sun machine.
Following is the modified version of the above job for the Sun machine.
0 6 * * 2,3,4,5,6 (/usr/bin/ksh ". .profile ; cd /tapes/gen_scripts ; generate_feed_contents.com standard_feed > /tapes/logs/standard_feed.cron.log 2>&1")
Note that in the above modified job, the env variables like TF_FEED_SRC and TF_FEED_LOG are replaced with the actual paths and quotes and parenthesis are used.
Can somebody please advise on:
1) Why the original cron job does not run?
2) What should I do to make the original cron job run?
3) What makes the modified cron job runs?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Shiv

Answer 1

ShivkumarSoni wrote:
From the above shown email, it is clear that the shell used by cron is sh and not ksh. May be this is the reason why the /usr/local/bin/all_roots script is not able to run properly and due to this the
environment variables are not getting set.That's exactly correct. From the crontab man page:
     The shell is invoked from your $HOME directory with an  arg0
     of sh. Users who desire to have their .profile executed must
     explicitly do so  in  the  crontab  file.  cron  supplies  a
     default environment for every shell, defining HOME, LOGNAME,
     SHELL(=/bin/sh), TZ, and PATH. The  default  PATH  for  user
     cron  jobs  is  /usr/bin;  while  root  cron jobs default to
     /usr/sbin:/usr/bin.  The  default  PATH  can   be   set   in
     /etc/default/cron; see cron(1M).
Can anyone help to understand what is going on here and how to fix it?Set the variables before running the program
Method 1) set in the crontab
* * * * * VAR=value /path/to/script --option=$VAR
Method 2) use a wrapper script
* * * * * /path/to/wrapper
While cron will use /bin/sh to run the line, there's nothing that keeps the wrapper script from being anything in particular (such as a ksh script).
Darren