crontab not running as root

Question

Mysql backup scripts not running as root crontab - help

I'm trying to run a crontab as root but the script is not running successfully. I can see in syslog that the script is executing but it does not finish.

Mar 28 04:01:01 ubuntumaster CRON[16812]: (root) CMD home/wayne/scripts/mysql_backup.sh)

Running the script at the command line works great... here's the script:

MyUSER="root" # USERNAME
MyPASS="devan13" # PASSWORD
MyHOST="localhost" # Hostname

# Linux bin paths, change this if it can not be autodetected via which command
MYSQL="$(which mysql)"
MYSQLDUMP="$(which mysqldump)"
CHOWN="$(which chown)"
CHMOD="$(which chmod)"
GZIP="$(which gzip)"

# Backup Dest directory, change this if you have someother location
DEST="/home/wayne/backup"

# Main directory where backup will be stored
MBD="$DEST/mysql"

# Get hostname
HOST="$(hostname)"

# Get data in dd-mm-yyyy format
NOW="$(date +"%d-%m-%Y")"

# File to store current backup file
FILE=""
# Store list of databases
DBS=""

# DO NOT BACKUP these databases
IGGY="thisdatabaseschema thatdatabase herdata mydata"     
[ ! -d $MBD ] && mkdir -p $MBD || :

# Only root can access it!
$CHOWN 0.0 -R $DEST
$CHMOD 0600 $DEST

# Get all database list first
DBS="$($MYSQL -u $MyUSER -h $MyHOST -p$MyPASS -Bse 'show databases')"

for db in $DBS
do
skipdb=-1
if [ "$IGGY" != "" ];
then
for i in $IGGY
do
[ "$db" == "$i" ] && skipdb=1 || :
done
fi

if [ "$skipdb" == "-1" ] ; then
FILE="$MBD/$db.$HOST.$NOW.gz"
# do all inone job in pipe,
# connect to mysql using mysqldump for select mysql database
# and pipe it out to gz file in backup dir :)
$MYSQLDUMP --quick -u $MyUSER -h $MyHOST -p$MyPASS $db | $GZIP -9 > $FILE
fi
done

Thanks, Wayne

Solution

Unless you've skipped some characters when writting the syslog output in your question, it looks like you've made a typo in your CRON command by forgetting the / in front of the command that should looks like :

/home/wayne/scripts/mysql_backup.sh

Comments

[BlitZz]

I hope your mysql password is not actually 'devan13'. If so, you'll probably want to change it now that you've posted it in a public forum.

[BlitZz]

I suggest adding a shebang (#!/bin/bash) as the first line of your script.

[terdon]

Whenever you need to debug things like this, you should add echo statements at different points in your script, then in the crontab redirect output to a log file script.sh > /path/to/log 2>&1 that way you can find where it is getting stuck.

[Wayne Gregori]

Thanks for the direction... my guess is that it is a path problem. Thank OpenSource community! love you guys/gals