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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T21:03:21+00:00

I have a rails rake task which runs just fine. I want this task

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I have a rails rake task which runs just fine. I want this task to be run periodically by crontab so I added it to crontab as follows :

0,30,0 * * * * cd /var/www/html/metajorn && RAILS_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/rake myraketask --trace   >> /var/www/html/metajorn/log/cron_log.log 2>&1

In cron_log.log I’m seeing the following error:

rake aborted!
invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:98:in `parse_gem_version'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:80:in `gem_version'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:59:in `load_rails_gem'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:54:in `load_initializer'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:38:in `run'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:11:in `boot!'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:110:in `<top (required)>'
/var/www/html/metajorn/Rakefile:4:in `require'
/var/www/html/metajorn/Rakefile:4:in `<top (required)>'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2383:in `load'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2383:in        `raw_load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2017:in `block in load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2068:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2016:in `load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2000:in `block in run'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2068:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:1998:in `run'
/usr/local/bin/rake:31:in `<main>'

It is noteworthy that the task is working fine if I run it manually.

Thanks,

M

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Thanks Carl Smotricz for the hint !

    I finally solved the problem:
    cron uses environment variables that may be different from the user environment variables… it was the case for me my crond service uses us-ascii encoding while my rake task uses utf-8.

    To fix the issue, I just had to change the encoding of crond by adding the following lines to my crond file (in my centos5 it is locaed in: /var/spool/cron/root )

    SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"

    Than, restarted crond : service crond restart

    M.

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