Cron not working

[Bruce Baillie]

I have 2 HP-UX 11.00 servers. I have a cron running on each that does hourly backups. It has been running fine for years. One is still working and one has stopped doing the hourly backups. I can run the script manually or copy and paste to the command line and it works. Cron will not run it with the error, find: missing conjunction. Here is the script.

rm -rf /temp/hourly.backups/monday/1pm/* #clear the directory
/usr/bin/find /aot1* /temp -newer /usr/local/bin/start.file -name *.prt | /usr/bin/cpio -pd /temp/hourly.backups/monday/1pm
/usr/bin/touch /usr/local/bin/start.file #reset the time

[Vijaya Kumar_3]

Looks like you have some issues with the find command.

Refer this thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=182956

Regards
Vijay Chinnasamy

[Vijaya Kumar_3]

More detailed thread is this:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x958f8cc5e03fd6118fff0090279
cd0f9,00.html

Regards
Vijay Chinnasamy

[Mel Burslan]

I would suspect an accidental insetion of a carriage return in that long cron line of yours or some other typo, when somebody was trying to edit this file for adding or deleting a cron job from it.

[Vijaya Kumar_3]

Compare the .profile settings from the both the systems. Also I would recommend to do a compare betweek /etc/profile as well.

Which shell you are running this with?

Regards
Vijay Chinnasamy

[Patrick Wallek]

What does /var/adm/cron/log tell you?

What has changed? Things don't normally just stop working.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Bruce:

One thing I see that may be the source of your problem is the expansion of "/aot1*". The expansion by the shell *before* find() runs may be causing the error.

Regards!

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Your code was poorly constructed and you have been fortunate that it has not bitten you before now. It has been an accident waiting to happen.

The problem is that the shell is instantiating *.prt before the find command ever sees it. As soon as 2 or more files in the same directory match that pattern, find cannot parse it. The correction is quite simple: ..prt becomes "*.prt" or slightly better still '*.prt'. Now that the expression is within quotes, the find command rather than the shell does the expansion of the expression.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Bruce:

Yes, Clay nailed it. To prove it simply do:

# cd /aot1
# echo *.prt

...This will cause the shell to expand all of the matching files. You will (when the failure occurs) see multiple files.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bruce Baillie]

Thanks Clay, putting *.prt in quotes solved the problem.

I know the command was not the greatest but it worked. I still don't know why it broke. Nothing on the system has changed and I am the only user. The error message was in the mail not the cron log.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

What happened is very simple. You had 2 or more files that matched *.prt in the current working directory when the find command was invoked. The rule for the -name find option is very simple -- always quote it. If the pattern string is constant (as in your case) then use single quotes. If variable substitution should take place before the find then (e.g. "*${MYVAR}.prt") then double quotes should be used. Of course, I always enclose variables in {}'s too -- even when I don't "need" to. I simply don't like code (even inside my head) then needlessly branches.