"mail:sender" not working from cron but works when run manually

Question

I have a shell script which will in-turn invokes a perl script. THe perl script has a mail sending functionality. The script runs very well when i run it manually from command prompt and delivers the mail also, while when scheduled from crontab the shell and perl both runs as per the log, but mail is not getting delivered.

Please find below code snippet

Shell Script :rmail.sh

#!/bin/sh

. /home/pm_prod/.bash_profile
export PATH=$PATH:/home/orapps/client/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/data2/software/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/pm_prod/bin/:

perl  /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.pl

Shell Script :rmail.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Mail::Sender;

# Send the file.  Change all variables to suit
my $sender = new Mail::Sender
{
    smtp => 'some.smtpserver.com',
    from => 'somename@somedomain.com'
};

$sender->MailFile(
{
    to      => 'somename@somedomain.com',
    subject => 'File',
    msg     => "Here is the data.\n",
    file    => '/home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/attachement_file.txt',
});

CronTab Entry

* * * * * sh /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.sh

Please help me

Do you have a custom `$PERL5LIB` in your environment? Can `perl` be found in the `$PATH` you set up? — glenn jackman, Mar 19 '15 at 13:39
Change the cron entry to `* * * * * sh /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.sh >/home/pm_prod/rmail.log 2>&1` and see what errors show up. — glenn jackman, Mar 19 '15 at 13:42
There are no errors that are getting logged, even when i redirect to log file. — Raghu Kalidindi, Mar 19 '15 at 16:17
@glenn, No, i do not have any custom variable in environment. Perl is installed in /usr/bin which is in $PATH — Raghu Kalidindi, Mar 19 '15 at 16:19
what's in /var/log/mail.log on the 'some.smtpserver.com' server? — Len Jaffe, Mar 19 '15 at 18:16
Your code is ignoring the return value from MailFile(). Try examining that, it might be educational — Len Jaffe, Mar 19 '15 at 18:18
To see the /var/log/mail you can do $tail -n 10 /var/log/mail or from terminal use $sudo mail — Praneeth, Mar 19 '15 at 18:41

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '15 at 10:24

0

Try this in cron:

* * * * * /bin/sh /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.sh

Or

 * * * * * /usr/bin/sh /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.sh

answered Mar 19 '15 at 10:24

Sergio Teixeira

72
1
1
7

Hi Sergio, I'm sorry as that was a typo. In the actual cron tab it is "* * * * * sh /home/pm_prod/PM/bin/ALERT/rmail.sh" – Raghu Kalidindi Mar 19 '15 at 10:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 23 '15 at 05:20

The issue is with the environment variables, we have to make sure to have all the environment variable when run manually be applicable from the crontab as well. I have followed below steps to achieve that

1. Get the current ENV variables from normal user and put them in to a file
env > /home/pm_prod/workspace/pmenv

2. Copy the content of pmenv file to my rmail.sh script

3. Now schedule rmail.sh script in crontab.

    Note : If you are too tired to test the script in crontab, you an optionally try to create a cron type environment with below command and test them before actually scheduling them as mentioned in point 3
* * * * * env > /home/pm_prod/workspace/cronenv
env - `cat /home/pm_prod/workspace/cronenv` /bin/sh

Raghu

"mail:sender" not working from cron but works when run manually

Shell Script :rmail.sh

Shell Script :rmail.pl

CronTab Entry

2 Answers2