What am I doing wrong here? Trying to set a cron job to run a shell script but it won't work. I entered the below after doing crontab -e. It does show up when doing contrab -l.
0 2 * * * root /root/localbackup.sh
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What do you mean by "it wont work"? – Michael Hampton Oct 18 '12 at 17:07
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wont work = cron doesn't run -- The script itself functions when hit manually – RonnieT Oct 18 '12 at 17:31
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Have you looked in the cron log? There should be an error message there that would say something like "root: command not found." which is explained by Iain's answer. – Ladadadada Oct 18 '12 at 17:37
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You're using the crontab format that's used for /etc/crontab. For the user crontabs you don't need to specify the user
0 2 * * * /root/localbackup.sh
should run.
Answering the commants
The output from vi is normal, crontab will copy it to the correct location
- Check that cron is running
- Check that there is a newline at the end of your command (crontab -e and press return at the end of the line)
- Check the root account's mail for any output that is mailed from cron.
- Capture the output of the command
0 2 ... &>/tmp/mylog.log
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Still not running. Revised to do `* * * * * /root/localbackup.sh` to test. The path in VI editor states `"/tmp/crontab.QUz4Io" 2L, 62C` – RonnieT Oct 18 '12 at 17:33
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Looks like I'm getting this error: `/bin/sh: /root/localbackup.sh: /bin/sh^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory` – RonnieT Oct 18 '12 at 18:17
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@RonnieT: That looks like you edited the script using windows (`^M` is a give away). On the CentOS machine run `dos2unix /root/localbackup.sh` this will convert it to unix format. Also ensure that the first line of your localbackup.sh is `#!/bin/sh` – user9517 Oct 18 '12 at 18:23
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Got it working. Cron was not the issue it was the formatting of the shell file. Thanks for your help! – RonnieT Oct 18 '12 at 18:35
