Question

I have been tasked to run a script from cron, so I have written following cronjob for the script and it output the following mentioned error message.

cronjob

#BE housekeeper.sh
* * * * * /product/tools/housekeeper.sh -t BE > /tmp/fileset.out 2>&1

fileset.out contain the error message. this is the error message.

/bin/sh: /product/tools/housekeeper.sh: Permission denied

why does it says permission denied. user1 can execute the housekeeper script as follows

$sh housekeeper.sh -t BE

then I checked whether user1 is allowed to run the cronjob. this check also pass. user1 is allowed to run crontab. so what could be the possible error in this case.

root      4181     1  0  2011 ?        00:00:00 crond
user1    7648  7564  0 06:18 pts/0    00:00:00 grep cron

I checked execute rights of the application

$ls -ltr

-rw-r----- 1 user1 aapp 11732 May 17 08:55 housekeeper.sh

does it says this application is executable

thanks in advance for anyhelp

Answer 1

You need to change housekeeper.sh to have 755 permission (executable)

chmod 755 housekeeper.sh

Running sh housekeeper.sh and /product/tools/housekeeper.sh has a slightly difference in the way that doing sh calls an executable called sh found in the $PATH and feed housekeeper.sh into it, so you only need read permission on housekeeper.sh, but directly running it by doing /product/tools/housekeeper.sh would require you to have execute permission (thus the 755)

EDIT

I see that you have -rw-r----- permission, that is quite simply 610, let me explain a bit

a file has 3 sets of permissions, represented in 3 groups of 3 bits. The first bit means read permission, as in your output, you see r, second bit is write permission w and third bit (which is not set, is x, executable bit). You have 3 sets of that, the first for Owner, Group and then Other, thus you have 9 bits

 111 111 111
 VVV VVV VVV
  |   |   |
Owner |   |
    Group |
        Other

so rw-r----- indicates that the owner has read and write bit, group has read bit, and other has no permission to do anything to this file.

Setting 755 will yield rwxr-xr-x, I’ll leave it to you to think why 😀