Question

I’ve been working on a script that is to be run from a couple different locations/servers (all checked out from svn). To get the script’s directory (used for generating files in the directory), I have been using this:

script_dir="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"

This works great, but does not seem to execute in crontab. I have made sure that there are no relative paths used in the script, and this script works through crontab when substituting $script_dir with the directory’s path.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

dirname is probably not in the default PATH for cron jobs. I don’t know about your system, but on OS X dirname is in /usr/bin, which isn’t in cron’s default PATH. If this is the problem, there are 3 easy ways to fix this:

1. Give the full path to the dirname command (and other commands you use in the script): script_dir="$( cd "$( /usr/bin/dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"
2. Explicitly set the PATH at the beginning of the script: PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin (or something like that)
3. Explicitly set the PATH in your crontab file: PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin (make sure this line is before the entry that runs your script)