running a cron job without rerading the .profile

[mrberry]

Does anyone know if there is a way to run a cron job without the users .profile being read? The users .profile has a an interactive menu and when a job is run through cron in never completes because it is waiting for user input.

Thanks

 

[ericbrunson]

If the cron job is a script and it has a shebang line, you probably need to add a -p to the invocation:

#!/bin/bash -p

If that doesn't fix it, then you need to wrap the interactive lines in some conditional. For my bash login files I use:

case $* in
    *i*) stty erase
         # interactive commands go here
        ;;
esac

 

[Mike042]

Hi mrberry,

I am curious to know which flavour of UNIX you are using because I have just checked the man pages (man crontab) on Tru64 UNIX and Solaris 8 and both say that the users .profile is not executed from cron. [Hence the number of recent posts from people wondering why PATH and other environmental variables are not set up as they want when running scripts from cron].

If this is the case you may want to re-investigate the reason(s) why your cron job never completes.

I hope that helps.

Mike

 

[columb]

I can confirm that I've checked AIX and it also doesn't read the .profile for cron jobs

Columb Healy
Living with a seeker after the truth is infinitely preferable to living with one who thinks they've found it.

 

[mrberry]

The OS is AIX 5.2. I took a users word he was unable to run a cron job because of his interactive .profile and was researching a way to prevent reading of the .profile. I will have to investigate more closely what he is doing.

Thanks for the replies.

Mark