used the top with cron

[Isaac_4]

I try to put the top in the cron, the error that I recived in mail root is.


Sorry, I need to know a more specific terminal type than 'unknown'.

[Robert Gamble · Accepted solution]

You probably need to modify the shell script you are running in the cron.

try:
#!/bin/sh
TERM=vt100 ; export TERM
top -f > /foo/top.out

[Michael Tully]

Top is supposed to run to a tty. It would better if you were trying to collect system performance information to use the measure agent of glance or the output of sar. There are many posts on this.

[Patrick Wallek]

If you are using top in a cron job, you probably want to specify the '-f filename' option as well so that output gets written to a file.

Something like:

top -d 5 -n 30 -f /tmp/filename

will run through 5 iterations of top with the top 30 processes of each iteration.

[Robert Gamble]

oops!

There should not be a redirect in my previous post.

top -f /foo/top.out

That will should work.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Actually, there is a way. Inside your cron script, do a top -f /var/tmp/tfile and then mail your tempfile.

You should of course, create a temp file name, mail it, and then remove the temp file but top -f filename is the key. Top will run once and exit.