running an NNTP program from crontab

[Gordon C. Galligher]

In article <RCARDENA.90Sep18163424 at inti.oracle.com> rcardena at oracle.com (Ricardo Cardenas) writes:
>
>What differences are there when running with crontab as opposed to
>running directly from the shell?  Anything I should be aware of?  I
>posted the following to gnu.emacs.gnus but noone has been able to help
>me.  Thanks in advance,
>

One of the major differences is terminal attachment.  When you execute it
in the shell, it has a controlling terminal (namely yours).  When you
background it, it also has a controlling terminal.  When jobs are executed
from cron, they do not have controlling terminals.  Gnu-emacs may attempt
to do things with a terminal, which it does not have.  In your 'ps' listing:

>USER       PID %CPU %MEM   SZ  RSS TT STAT START  TIME COMMAND
>rcardena  7440 72.8  5.1  520  344 ?  R N  16:07  13:49 /bin/emacs -batch -l /elisp/gnus -f gnus-batch-kill talk.bizarre
>rcardena  7439  0.0  0.4   32   24 ?  I N  16:07   0:00 sh -c /bin/emacs -batch -l /elisp/gnus -f gnus-batch-kill talk.bizarre
                                    ^^
It shows no controlling terminal.  This may have nothing to do with your
problem, but it is definitely something different from a shell and cron job.
I do hope this helps, and if not you directly, I hope it will jog someone's
memory into figuring out the problem.

		-- Gordon.

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