Running nickel through cron

[HutchAdmin]

I want to run nickel utility on my HPUX11.11 (SD32) through cron. I have already created a script which call nickel, write logs, and send the completion status through e-mail. I am able to run that scripts through shell but it is not running through cron.

CRON ENTRY
---------------------------------------
00 11 * * * su - root -c "/usr/bin/sh /opt/contrib/bin/nickel_out.sh > /dev/null 2>/dev/null"
----------------------------------------

ERROR IN LOGS
--------------------------------------
################################## STARTING NICKEL Mon Oct 29 14:10:00 IST 2007 ##############
process not attached to terminal
Usage: who [-rbtpludAasHTqRm] [am i] [utmp_like_file]

r run level
b boot time
t time changes
p processes other than getty or users
l login processes
u useful information
d dead processes
A accounting information
a all (rbtpludA options)
s short form of who (no time since last output or pid)
H print header
T status of tty (+ writable, - not writable, x exclusive open, ? hung)
q quick who
R print host name

ERROR: The tool is already running under pid: 19416

You must wait until it completes.

###################################### END NICKEL Mon Oct 29 14:10:01 IST 2007 ###################

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

cron lackes necessary environment.

Have your script source /etc/profile and .profile for the intended user and most of these issues will probably be resolved.

Or do it manually

Command line

stty -a (make sure that env is duplicated in your script)
env > env.txt

Make sure that environment, especially PATH.

ERROR: The tool is already running under pid: 19416
Make sure the tool is only running once. It seems to object to being run twice.

SEP

[HutchAdmin]

>>>
ERROR: The tool is already running under pid: 19416
>>>

Never found no tool running at that time when my cron ( nickel) runs, I checked the using.
#ps -aef|grep
#ps -aef|grep -i nickel

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

I suspect, that the last error shown
>>
ERROR: The tool is already running under pid: 19416
<<
is a followup caused by the error at startup.

- Why do you use a
su - root -c "..."
as a cron command?
The crontab entry done by user 'root', so no 'su' is required.

- The errors
>>
process not attached to terminal
Usage: who [-rbtpludAasHTqRm] [am i] [utmp_like_file]
<<
are for sure caused by sourcing .profile via "su - ...".

For this I recommend to transfer the setup of the environment needed for running nickel in a seperate file - e.g. /var/opt/nickelrc and sourcing that in .profile as well as in the crontab entry.

Then you could modify your crontab entry to
00 11 * * * . /var/opt/nickelrc;/opt/contrib/bin/nickel_out.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

mfG Peter

[Anshumali]

Do you have who -m or whoami in your profile?
When a command is executed via cron, there is no tty or pty terminal associated with the process. so you may try excecuting it with su without "-" option, set the enviroment for the cron manually as SEP said:
env > env.txt


Anshumali

[Anshumali]

BTW does the exchange support 10Mb attchment(If i am not wrong about nickel output) file thorugh Relayed Exchange in hutch...You may also think to zip it before you create this much of traffic. :)

VEL,Mum :)

[HutchAdmin]

Anshu,
I am not e-mailing the nickel output but the logs only to confirm if my nickel created successfully or not. So 10MB limitation :) is taken care.

Thanks,