👀 Views: 95 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-26

ubuntu cron environment-variables bash

Can someone help me understand I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. This might be a silly question, but I'm working with an scenario where my `cron` job doesn't seem to execute a specific script as expected on my Ubuntu 22.04 server. The script is intended to run every day at midnight, but it hasn't run yet. Here's what I've done to troubleshoot: First, I added the job to the crontab using `crontab -e`: ```bash 0 0 * * * /path/to/my_script.sh ``` To ensure that the script is executable, I ran: ```bash chmod +x /path/to/my_script.sh ``` However, the script relies on certain environment variables that are set in my user profile. I noticed that when I run the script manually from the terminal, it works fine, but when it runs from `cron`, it fails silently. To check for errors, I redirected the output and behavior messages in my crontab entry: ```bash 0 0 * * * /path/to/my_script.sh >> /var/log/my_script.log 2>&1 ``` After a couple of nights, I checked the log file, but it only shows "No such file or directory" errors, which doesn't make sense because the script exists and works from the terminal. I suspect that the scenario is related to the environment variables not being available when the script runs under the `cron` environment. In my script, I'm using variables set in `~/.bashrc`, but according to my research, cron jobs do not load profile scripts. I tried adding the necessary environment variables directly in the script like this: ```bash export VAR1=value1 export VAR2=value2 ``` Still, it doesn't seem to help. Can someone explain why this might be happening and suggest how to ensure that my script has access to the required environment variables when executed by `cron`? Any tips on best practices for running scripts via `cron` would also be appreciated. This is part of a larger service I'm building. Any ideas what could be causing this? Has anyone else encountered this? My team is using Bash for this desktop app.