Question

I have a svn backup script in a redhat linux. let’s it called svnbackup.sh

It works fine, when I run it in terminal.

But when I put it into crontab, it will not bring the svnserve back, even the data is backuped correctly.

What’s wrong with me???

killall svnserve
tar -zcf /svndir /backup/
svnserve -d -r /svndir

Answer 1

Usually, ‘environment’ is the problem in a cron job that works when run ‘at the terminal’ but not when it is run by cron. Most probably, your PATH is not set to include the directory where you keep svnserve.

Either use an absolute pathname for svnserve or set PATH appropriately in the script.

You can debug, in part, by adding a line such as:

env > /tmp/cron.job.env

to your script to see exactly how little environment is set when your cron job is run.