Solution to cron+script+syslog problem

Bob Weissman rlw at well.UUCP
Wed Feb 19 04:20:35 AEST 1986


Thanks to all who responded to my message about being unable to do
a syslog from a C shell script under su under cron.  Since I got so
many reponses (some of which were close, but not entirely right),
I thought I'd post the solution (also thereby acknowledging that I
now have the answer & y'all can stop helping now).

The problem is the lack of environment under cron.  Little goodies
you expect to be set, such as $USER and $PATH don't exist.  In fact
the entire environment, as printed out by printenv under cron is:
HOME=/

So the solution was to check for unset variables and set the ones you
need.

Thanks again to all respondents.
-- Bob Weissman
   G.WEISSMAN at SU-SCORE.ARPA
   ..!well.rlw



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