What is the PATH of cron?
When you create a crontab file, it is automatically placed in the /var/spool/cron/crontabs directory and is given your user name. You can create or edit a crontab file for another user, or root, if you have superuser privileges. Enter crontab command entries as described in “Syntax of crontab File Entries”.
Does crontab require full PATH?
You should put full paths in your crontab . That’s the safest option. If you don’t want to do that you can put a wrapper script around your programs, and set the PATH in there. e.g.
What is the cron environment and cron job failures?
This environment consists of environment variables, a working directory, umask, resource limits, etc. Sometimes a job run by cron fails, but runs successfully when run from the command line. This problem is often caused by the job’s environment. What is the cron environment?
Is there a way to get Cron to call in the correct paths?
Since cron doesn’t run in a shell per say it does not pull in .bashrc. Is there a way of pulling this in without having to write a bash script wrapper? I used /etc/crontab. I used vi and entered in the PATHs I needed into this file and ran it as root. The normal crontab overwrites PATHs that you have set up. A good tutorial on how to do this.
How is Cron related to the crontab process?
Cron is a process that reads crontab files and runs programs and scripts at the times that are specified in the crontab files. The programs and scripts that are executed by cron become child processes of cron, and thus inherit cron’s process environment.
How can I check the environment variables of cron?
Check the environment variables cron is using by appending a dummy job which dumps env to a file like this: Compare that with the output of env in a normal shell session. You can prepend your own environment variables to the local crontab by defining them at the top of your crontab.