Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4053 mails)

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 27-Aug-01 Bruce Marshall wrote:
> On Monday 27 August 2001 05:21 pm, Ray Booysen wrote:
>> is the path needed.  I need to send a signal.  I want to run "killall
>> -TERM
>> proxyper" as the command.  Will this work
>> as it is?
> 
> Dunno... You'd have to try it.  I suspect the path is needed.

I'd reccomend always putting in the full path; that way you're
safe.

Cron sets up some environment variables for the commands it runs
according to the user who owns the crontab file. For instance,
it picks up $HOME from the user's entry in /etc/passwd (see
man 5 crontab). So you could certainly have a crontab line like

  * * * * * $HOME/bin/myprog

But $PATH is very much a "dynamic" variable for a user, and there's
no reliable way cron could look for a user's particular current
$PATH.

If you want to make sure that cron uses a particular $PATH you can
set this in the crontab file, with a line like

  PATH="/the/path:/you/want:/to/use"

(nothing else: this sort of crontab line is not time-linked and
so is global) in which case you can omit full paths from the cron
commands provided they're covered by the crotab $PATH.

Ted.

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Date: 28-Aug-01                                       Time: 10:48:41
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