Sun 28 Oct 2007
Posted by Oliver under Open Source , Personal , Technology
A while ago I got into updating my FreeBSD installation automatically. Now, I wrote my blog entry but didn’t test the cron part. I found a nice page that explained getting cron running on linux. I’m pretty sure I didn’t search for linux but that’s what I found and I figured most things like this would be the same. I was wrong 
The problem is that in linux you have to specify the user that the command will be run as like
15 * * * * root /usr/bin/command.sh
but with FreeBSD (unix) the command does not need a user specified
15 * * * * /usr/bin/command.sh
Since I had the word “root” after the time-to-run designations I guess cron thought the command to run was “root” and then when that came up as not a command it just finished. I finally decided to take the user’s name out and I got a test script to run. Success! Well, not quite. Seems my actual script needed to have the full path to the command. Well, I put that in and it worked fine. Next thing will be to put the path in the script or crontab so absolute paths of commands will not be necessary.
Wow, thanks, man. That means a lot, especially coming from you!
Robin is talking about these wonderful photos she got out in Scotland