Trying to stop a service with cron

11.04 cron crontab

9,174

Solution 1

Looks like /sbin is not in $PATH when starting it from cron. Add a line like

PATH = /sbin:$PATH

to the crontab file.

Solution 2

I've had exactly this issue, and it would appear that the $PATH variable is completely empty when crontab is run, so it's not enough to put PATH=/usr/sbin;$PATH at the top of the crontab list.

So, what I did was (since I'm running this crontab as root, so I can turn off the squid proxy):

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

and it seems to have worked.

Solution 3

Hmmm...it's strange that cron is trying to run "stop"...

Try making cron run this instead:

sh -c '/usr/sbin/service powernap stop'

9,174

Author by

Luke Stapley

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Luke Stapley over 1 year
On my Ubuntu 11.04 server when I try to run
```
 service powernap stop
```
as a cron job with the root user, it fails and gives me this message in syslog
```
 NAS CRON[10853]: (CRON) error (grandchild #10854 failed with exit status 2)
```
and this is emailed to the root users email account
```
 exec: 129: stop: not found
```
I can start and stop the powernap service from the command line so why doesn't it work from cron?
- enzotib almost 13 years
  
  How do you exactly setup the cron job?
- nilsonneto almost 13 years
  
  did you try /usr/sbin/service powernap stop ? i.e. the full path to service
enzotib almost 13 years

Without spaces around =, of course
Christopher B. Adkins almost 13 years

In crontab it should work with the spaces (unlike in a sh compatibel shell)
Christopher B. Adkins almost 13 years

/usr/sbin/service is a shell script that is trying to run stop (which is sbin/stop) here.
Andrew Gunnerson almost 13 years

@Florian: I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.
Luke Stapley almost 13 years

thanks, I'm going to try both these sugestions, even though I have no idea what sh -c is. What does it do?
Luke Stapley almost 13 years

Thanks Florian, this worked (and I did include the spaces between the =)
Luke Stapley almost 13 years

This just gave me a different error message CRON[11394]: (CRON) error (grandchild #11395 failed with exit status 127), but thanks for your help anyway.
m0j0 over 12 years

Had the same issue. Cron was setting PATH to /usr/bin:/bin. Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path in my script fixed it right up.
rosch over 11 years

For some reason this did not work for me. I still have to investigate why. $PATH was not evaluated in the expression. This worked for me: PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin