3

I have a cron job that runs once a day on a Linux server and in the script it executes there is a test:

# Validate ffmpeg is installed
if [ $(which ffmpeg | grep -c "ffmpeg") -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "error: ffmpeg is not installed!" | tee -a "$log"
    exit 1
fi

Every day when I check the logfile, the message ffmpeg is not installed! is in the log and as result the work has not been executed. If I run the which test in the shell everything works fine and when I execute the script everything works.

Is there something intrinsic to cron that prevents it from being able to properly use the which command?

user9517
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Neal Bailey
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    Why not just use `[ -x /path/to/ffmpeg ] ...` to check it exists and is executable ? http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_01.html – user9517 Apr 01 '13 at 21:11
  • What would be the point of the test if you already know that ffmpeg is installed and its installation path? This test ensures that users don't try to run the program on a server which doesn't have ffmpeg installed. – Neal Bailey Apr 02 '13 at 21:24

2 Answers2

7

At the top of your crontab file put SHELL and PATH declaration like:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

See this SE post for more details.

The default SHELL and PATH for cron are SHELL=/bin/sh, PATH=/usr/bin:/bin (From man 5 crontab man page).

Community
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Jonathan Ben-Avraham
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6

It probably does not pick up your path since it's running from cron. There are several ways to make it know the path the easiest I have found is just hard code the path to which.

Do a:

locate which

Mine returns this:

[user@server ~]$ locate which |grep bin
/usr/bin/which

Then change your script to do:

if [ $(/usr/bin/which ffmpeg | grep -c "ffmpeg") -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "error: ffmpeg is not installed!" | tee -a "$log"
    exit 1
fi

Another option is to set the environment and path in the crontab:

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
J Baron
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