Question

I’ve got a script in sh under Solaris 5.8 that isn’t working as expected and don’t really know why…

The script reads a list of URLs from a file, tests them with curl and writes the output to a log file:

#!/bin/sh

# Logs path
LOG_DIR=/somedir/logs

# URLs file path
URL_FILE=/somedir/url

# Actual date
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

# CURL
CURL=/somedir/bin/curl

test_url()
{
    cat $URL_FILE | grep -i $1 | while read line
    do
        NAME=`echo $line | awk '{ print $1 }'`
        URL=`echo $line | awk '{ print $2 }'`
        TIME=`$CURL -s -o /dev/null -w %{time_total} $URL`
        echo "$DATE $TIME" >> $LOG_DIR/${NAME}_${1}.log
    done
}

test_url someurl
test_url someotherurl

The URL_FILE has this layout:

somename1 http://someurl/test
somename2 http://someotherurl/test

The script loads the URLs from the file and then uses curl to get the total time the URL takes to load, then prints the date and the time (in ms). The problem I find is that the variable TIME doesn’t work when called inside a crontab, but it does when called with the user itself:

# Output when called with the user ./script.sh
201202201018 0.035
# Output when called from crontab.
201202201019

If I redirect all output * * * * * /path/to/script/script.sh 1&2 > /tmp/output, the output file is blank.

Also I haven’t been able to see any output in /var/log/syslog about it. Any clue why TIME variable isn’t displaying correctly when called via crontab?

Answer 1

Things you should check out:

1. Is /path/to/script/script.sh 1&2 > /tmp/output valid in your cron? On my machine, it would run the script with argument “1” and try to find a program called “2” to run it. Failing to find it, it creates an empty output file. I think you’re looking for something like /path/to/script/script.sh >> /tmp/output 2>&1
2. Do you set CURL to the full path of curl? Cron normally doesn’t have the same path information that you have.
3. Which user do you use for running cron? Could there be access restrictions to curl or the network?
4. % is indeed handled differently by cron, if it’s written in the crontab. It means newline, and should otherwise be escaped. Have you been running tests with curl directly in cron? As long as you keep this in your script you should be fine.