CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellcron
HelpingHand
HelpingHand

Reputation: 1065

Deal with different directories in bash cron

The problem...

I use trick77's IP blacklist script to configure the firewall of my apache server and am able to run his script in terminal.

However, when assigning the bash script in ipset-blacklist to crontab, it will not run no matter what I do.

Code written in crontab file for root:

@daily /var/bash/update-blacklist.sh

What I think is the culprit...

Since I haven't done this sort of thing before, I believe that the PATH of the bash script isn't set correctly... but again, I'm not sure.

I have seen others using a line such as PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin to resolve problems involving the script's location, but, I don't exactly know what this does.

I set the location of the bash file to /var/bash instead of /usr/bin and I believe that this is throwing things off.

Pardon my lack of understanding. I really am a beginner when it comes to bash.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

What I have done...

Per @EtanReisner:

  1. Added echo here >> /tmp/update-blacklist.out to top of update-blacklist.sh and set cron to run it every minute (* * * * *).

    The file was successfully created.

  2. Added type -p curl grep egrep ipset >> /tmp/update-blacklist.out to top of update-blacklist.sh and returned:

-p: not found curl is /usr/bin/curl grep is /bin/grep egrep is /bin/egrep ipset: not found

Upvotes: 1

Views: 137

Answers (1)

Etan Reisner
Etan Reisner

Reputation: 80931

The output from type ipset indicated that ipset was not in the cron script PATH which isn't surprising.

The default PATH for cron jobs is fairly limited.

With ipset located in /usr/sbin that is the path that must be added to the cron script's PATH variable.

You talked about this in your question

I have seen others using a line such as PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin to resolve problems involving the script's location, but, I don't exactly know what this does.

What that does is set the PATH variable to those paths (from whatever the default value was).

The PATH variable contains the paths where the shell looks for binaries/scripts/etc. to run when you try to run them as commands.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions