Question

I have a script that I’m trying to run from cron. When I run it from bash, it work just fine. However when I let cron do it’s thing, I get a:

myscript.sh: line 122: syntax error: unexpected end of file

What I want is a way to run a command as if it was a cron job, but do it in my shell.

As a side note: does anyone know what would be differnt under cron? (the script already has a #!/bin/sh line)

---

To answer my own question: I added this to my crontab:

*  *   * * *    bcs     for ((i=$(date +\%M); i==$(date +\%M) ;)) ; do find ~/.crontemp/ -name '*.run' -exec "{}" ";" ; sleep 1; done`

and created this script:

#!/bin/sh
tmp=$(mktemp ~/.crontemp/cron.XXXXX)
mknod $tmp.pipe p
mv $tmp $tmp.pre
echo $* '>' $tmp.pipe '1>&2' >> $tmp.pre
echo rm $tmp.run >> $tmp.pre
chmod 700 $tmp.pre
mv $tmp.pre $tmp.run
cat $tmp.pipe
rm $tmp.pipe

With that, I can run an arbitrary command with a delay of not more than one second.

(And yes, I know there are all kinds of security issue involved in that)

the problem was a fi vs. if problem. Doh!

Answer 1

There are a number of things it could be – output will be redirected elsewhere; environment variables will almost certainly be different, etc. On the information you’ve given, it could be related to a difference between bash and /bin/sh (which on some systems – including Debian/Ubuntu flavors of Linux – are different, and support slightly different syntax). Cron will usually run the command you give to it using /bin/sh.

Try running:

/bin/sh -c '<command>'

where <command> comes from your crontab. (Of course, if that command uses '' quotes you will need to modify it accordingly…)