Question

I’ve been trying to get crontab to work for a while but it doesnt seem to want to work. The python script I need to initialise every midnight works perfectly from the command terminal. The location of my python script is:

/home/rv/ncbi-blast-2.2.23+/database_backup/backup.py

My contab looks like this:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/home/rv/ncbi-blast-2.2.23+/database_backup
MAILTO=root
HOME=/
# For details see man 4 crontabs

# Example of job definition:
# .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
# |  .------------- hour (0 - 23)
# |  |  .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# |  |  |  .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
# |  |  |  |  .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# |  |  |  |  |
# *  *  *  *  *  command to be executed
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/python /home/rv/ncbi-blast-2.2.23+/database_backup/backup.py

My python script looks like the following:

#!/usr/bin/python

from subprocess import Popen
import datetime

today = datetime.date.today()

today = str(today)

#print today

f = open("/home/rv/ncbi-blast-2.2.23+/database_backup/%s.sql" % (today), "w")
x =  Popen(["mysqldump", "-u", "root", "-p*****", "normalisation"], stdout = f)
x.wait()
f.close()

Any idea where im going wrong?

---

Just looked at the cron logs and i got this for each time entry I tried

(root) BAD FILE MODE (/etc/crontab)

I got the same error when i tried with a shell script aswell

Answer 1

Perhaps instead of using Python, make a bash script:

mysql_backup.sh

#!/bin/bash
/PATH/TO/mysqldump -u root -p***** normalisation > /SOMEOTHER/PATH/TO/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').sql

and place this in your crontab:

0 0 * * * /PATH/TO/mysql_backup.sh