Bash script behaving differently in crontab vs manually run

[LHammonds]

Greetings.

I have a script that purges files from a folder and I would like a record (log file) of what files were purged.

I wrote the following snippet and it works when executing it from the command line:

LOGFILE="/path/to/logfiles/purge-folder.log"
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script started." >> ${LOGFILE}
for file in "/path/to/folder/*.txt"
do
  echo " - INFO: Deleting ${file}" >> ${LOGFILE}
  rm ${file}
done
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script completed." >> ${LOGFILE}

When I run it from the command line, the log file looks like this (shows each file deleted individually):

2013-03-01_10:43:35 - Script started.
 - INFO: Deleting /path/to/folder/20130227.txt
 - INFO: Deleting /path/to/folder/20130228.txt
 - INFO: Deleting /path/to/folder/20130301.txt
2013-03-01_10:43:35 - Script completed.

When run from crontab, the log file looks like this (no matter how many files are deleted):

2013-03-02_10:00:01 - Script started.
 - INFO: Deleting /path/to/folder/*.txt
2013-03-02_10:00:01 - Script completed.

This is how my root crontab looks:

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
0 10 * * * /path/to/scripts/purge-folder.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

Any idea on how to get the script to behave in crontab like it does at the command-line?

Thanks,
LHammonds

[schragge]

Remove excessive quoting

LOGFILE="/path/to/logfiles/purge-folder.log"
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script started." >> ${LOGFILE}
for file in /path/to/folder/*.txt # excessive double quotes removed from this line
do
  echo " - INFO: Deleting ${file}" >> ${LOGFILE}
  rm ${file}
done
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script completed." >> ${LOGFILE}

[LHammonds]

I'll give that a shot but I added the quotes to see if that would help solve the problem.

EDIT: Ha! That did it! Not sure what I had done before since I added the quotes to see if that would resolve the problem but it is working now. Thanks

[schragge]

Shell globs (*) don't get expanded inside double quotes. Besides, you will still get the message

- INFO: Deleting /path/to/folder/*.txt

if there are no files in the folder matching this pattern. You may choose to ignore it, or test for presense of any files to be deleted beforehand. If your script is bash (as opposite to /bin/sh), you also can set shopt -s nullglob before entering the loop.

[LHammonds]

Good point about the file check. I should do that no matter what before an rm command.

Script modified as such:

LOGFILE="/path/to/logfiles/purge-folder.log"
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script started." >> ${LOGFILE}
for file in /path/to/folder/*.txt
do
  if [ -f ${file} ]; then
    echo " - INFO: Deleting ${file}" >> ${LOGFILE}
    rm ${file}
  fi
done
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` - Script completed." >> ${LOGFILE}

[schragge]

If you don't have thousands of .txt files in the folder then I'd rewrite it like this (sed is optional, in case you don't like the output of rm -v)

LOGFILE="/path/to/logfiles/purge-folder.log"
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%T` - Script started." >> ${LOGFILE}
rm -fv /path/to/folder/*.txt | sed 's/^removed/ - INFO: Deleting/'  >> ${LOGFILE}
echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%T` - Script completed." >> ${LOGFILE}