Email is not sending when the script is running by CRON

Question

I wrote the simple backup bash script and at the end of it, it's sending an email to me that backup is ready. Everything works perfect when I run this script from terminal (root), but when the script is running by CRON, email is not sending :-/.

#!/bin/sh
filename=$(date +%d-%m-%Y)
backup_dir="/mnt/backup/"
email_from_name="BACKUP"
email_to="my@email"
email_subject="Backup is ready"
email_body_file="/tmp/backup-email-body.txt"

tar czf "$backup_dir$filename.tgz" "/home/www"

echo "Subject: $email_subject" > $email_body_file
ls $backup_dir -sh >> $email_body_file

sendmail -F $email_from_name  -t $email_to < $email_body_file

-t means extract recipients from message headers. -F sets the fullname of the sender and -f sets the envelope sender address. — adamo, Jul 06 '12 at 20:54

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '12 at 20:11

2

Cronjobs run in a minimal environment, so you can't even assume that $PATH is set correctly. The script is probably failing to find the sendmail executable. Set $PATH explicitly in the crontab to something like this, or specify the full path to sendmail in the script.

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

answered Jul 06 '12 at 20:11

mgorven

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and after setting path add `export PATH` in the very next line – adamo Jul 06 '12 at 20:45
@adamo Not in crontabs. – mgorven Jul 06 '12 at 20:49
Yep! I missed that part. Diagonally I assumed that you meant that he should set PATH in his script. – adamo Jul 06 '12 at 20:51
Yea! You're right! I changed "sendmail" to "/usr/sbin/sendmail" and it works perfect now! Thanks – badam Jul 07 '12 at 13:05
You should accept this as the answer: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5234/how-does-accepting-an-answer-work – MECU Jan 08 '13 at 19:27

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 18 '14 at 15:57

1

This is the environment issue , we need to set the env path in cron as below

38 03 * * 5  /bin/ksh c ". /home/adcis/caliber/.profile ;
/home/xyz/abc/ABCD_BATCH/REPORT_ABC/amb_main_script.ksh" >> /home/xyz/abc/ABCD_BATCH/LOGS/output.txt

edited Jun 18 '14 at 15:57

squillman

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answered Jun 18 '14 at 15:21

user226917

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Email is not sending when the script is running by CRON

2 Answers2