sourcing /etc/profile and .profile in cronjobs

[Jeganathan Venkitasamy_3]

Hi,

In HP-UX 11i, is there any simple and standard way to source .profile and /etc/profile in a cronjob than just explicitly add lines
" . $HOME/.profile
. /etc/profile" in the cronjob scripts?

We are running HP-UX 11.00 ( we will be moving to 11i soon) and we do explicitly call /etc/profile & .profile in cron job scripts. But I think this is not a nice method. Any better ways?

Thanks & regards,
Jegi

[James Specht]

I have an 11i box and this is quoted from the man of crontab.

"Users who desire to have their .profile executed must explicitly do so in the crontab entry or in a script called by the entry."

I'll follow the thread for a while to see if anyone has a way, because I do the same thing when needed.

--Jim

[Pete Randall]

Jegi,

That's the only way I know of.



Pete

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Jegi,

Although outright sourcing *will* work the majority of the time, you have to be careful about routines in the profiles that are looking for a terminal. In these cases where there is NO terminal, you'll get the messages like:

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
ttytype: couldn't open /dev/tty for reading
stty: : Not a typewriter

Now normally this isn't a big problem, but it can be avoided by creating a file to source all the necessary environment variables from without ANY code or routines that might be looking for a terminal.
Then you can just source that file in the profile & .profile files as well as the beginning of any cron job scripts.

My $0.02,
Jeff

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is something that you really don't want to do. The problem is that almost all .profile's contain commands like tset, tput, tabs which expect an interactive environment --- which you ain't. You could surround all those commands with
if [[ -t 0 ]]
then
tput
tset
...
fi

but the far better way is to create a file which sets and exports any needed variables, e.g. /usr/local/bin/myenv.sh and then both your .profile and cron scripts source this file via the dot command. This sources file must not contain an exit or return statement or it will have the unintended effect of exiting the foreground (shell) process.

[Pete Randall]

In light of the more recent responses, my initial post looks a trifle simplistic - I'll qualify my answer:

The only way I know of to ensure that all required environment variables are set in cron jobs is to either code them in the script, or source a file containing the required variables. This *could* be /etc/profile or .profile, but you would be better off to create a separate script containing just the variables required.


Pete