Removing "dot" from PATH

[Peter Mills_5]

I want to remove the dot from the PATH for a cron job. Despite not being in /etc/profile /etc/PATH .profile and no other dot files being sourced it still appears in the PATH. I've tried sh, ksh, and csh, and cannot find out where it is coming from. Any ideas? (HP-UX 10.20,11.00)

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Peter,

Sorry to say that's the way cron works. From the man page for crontab:

"cron supplies a default environment for every shell, defining:

HOME=user's-home-directory
LOGNAME=user's-login-id
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:.
SHELL=/usr/bin/sh"


Pete

[John Palmer]

Hi Peter,

Cron jobs don't by default source any of the files that you mention. The job itself will inherit whatever PATH is set in the cron daemon itself.

You could set PATH to whatever you want and restart cron.

Also check the cron startup script (/sbin/init.d/cron) to see if that sets PATH.

I am assuming that currently, cron jobs have a PATH setting which includes .

Regards,
John