Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 13:27:10 +0200 From: Willem Brown <willem@brwn.org> To: Ben Smithurst <ben@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Nathan Vidican <webmaster@wmptl.com>, questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /etc/crontab not work? Message-ID: <20000819132710.J52323@snoopy.brwn.org> In-Reply-To: <20000819030319.B58928@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>; from ben@FreeBSD.org on Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 03:03:19AM %2B0100 References: <399A89CC.AA704AD6@wmptl.com> <20000817111319.B40744@snoopy.brwn.org> <20000819030319.B58928@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>
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Hi,
My apologies, I took what it said literally in the man page and did
not think about that it uses the -c switch to execute the command. It
did not even occur to me at the time, although I have noticed this on
many occasions.
I tried it just now and /bin/sh /bin/ls just outputs the following
/bin/ls: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
whilst /bin/sh -c /bin/ls works as expected.
Sorry for the misleading info.
On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 03:03:19AM +0100, Ben Smithurst wrote:
> Willem Brown wrote:
>
> > Cron uses /bin/sh to execute the script like this.
> >
> > /bin/sh script
>
> If it did that, it would have real trouble with a cron command like
>
> * * * * * /bin/ls
>
> Try "/bin/sh /bin/ls" at a prompt and see what happens (don't really,
> take it from me that you'll likely get garbage on your screen or a
> syntax error with some weird error message). It uses "/bin/sh -c
> whatever-command-is-there", so that /bin/sh will just call exec() on
> the perl script, which will work because of the #! line. Assuming the
> execute bit is set, which it must be if the command works on the command
> line. If the execute bit wasn't set, then explicitly invoking perl
> would fix it. If your suggest does fix it, and the execute bit is set,
> then I don't know what's going on. Since Nathan says there's no output
> or errors or anything logged, I'm rather confused anyway.
>
> > I based this on my interpretation of the following from the crontab(5) man
> > page, which means that I might be wrong.
> >
> > The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % char-
> > acter, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL
> > variable of the cronfile.
>
> Just a slight misunderstanding, I think. /bin/sh is used, but not in the
> way you suggest.
>
> --
> Ben Smithurst / ben@FreeBSD.org / PGP: 0x99392F7D
> FreeBSD Documentation Project /
Best Regards
Willem Brown
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