Crontab Errors

**Rodney9** · February 15th, 2012

I get this error in syslog when I try to run cron -

Feb 15 18:24:01 9 CRON[2689]: (rodney) CMD (/bin/alarm.sh)
Feb 15 18:24:01 9 CRON[2688]: (CRON) error (grandchild #2689 failed with exit status 1)
Feb 15 18:24:01 9 CRON[2688]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

The script I am trying to run is called alarm.sh
The script is

Code:

#!/bin/sh

xterm -e ogg123 -z ~/Music/*.ogg

The crontab is

Code:

24 18 15 02 * /bin/alarm.sh

The script runs from the terminal or 'RUN'

Any clues ?
Rodney

**Grenage** · February 15th, 2012

Try changing your script so that it has absolute paths, then try cron again?

Code:

xterm -e ogg123 -z ~/Music/*.ogg

Code:

xterm -e ogg123 -z /home/bob/Music/*.ogg

**Rodney9** · February 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by Grenage

Try changing your script so that it has absolute paths, then try cron again?

Code:

xterm -e ogg123 -z ~/Music/*.ogg

Code:

xterm -e ogg123 -z /home/bob/Music/*.ogg

Changed script to

Code:

#!/bin/sh

xterm -e ogg123 -z  /home/rodney/Music/*.ogg

Still works in terminal

Still get error

F

Code:

eb 15 19:39:01 9 CRON[3222]: (rodney) CMD (/bin/alarm.sh)
Feb 15 19:39:01 9 CRON[3221]: (CRON) error (grandchild #3222 failed with exit status 1)
Feb 15 19:39:01 9 CRON[3221]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

Rodney

**Grenage** · February 15th, 2012

Code:

which xterm

Will give you xterm's path. Try using that, rather than just the name in your script.

**Cheesehead** · February 15th, 2012

The 'xterm' command opens a window on your display.

But cron does not have access to your user-level environment variables. It has no idea what display you are using. So it cannot open the window...error.

You must tell cron which display to open.

For example, to determine the current display:

Code:

$ printenv | grep DISPLAY
DISPLAY=:0.0

So alarm.sh would be:

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/xterm -e ogg123 -z /home/bob/Music/*.ogg

**Rodney9** · February 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by Cheesehead

The 'xterm' command opens a window on your display.

But cron does not have access to your user-level environment variables. It has no idea what display you are using. So it cannot open the window...error.

You must tell cron which display to open.

For example, to determine the current display:

Code:

$ printenv | grep DISPLAY
DISPLAY=:0.0

So alarm.sh would be:

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/xterm -e ogg123 -z /home/bob/Music/*.ogg

Code:

printenv | grep DISPLAY
PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
DISPLAY=:

0

Thankyou that did trick with

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/xterm -e ogg123 -z /home/rodney/Music/*.ogg

Rodney

**ephestione** · July 28th, 2012

Late to the party, but on a slightly unrelated note, assigning a DISPLAY is necessary also for other tasks, in my case audio-recorder, which fired regularly from crontab but didn't really start recording audio chunks until I specified the destination display as Chesehead suggested.
So thank you Cheesehead

**Rahul Chetwani** · January 10th, 2013

Hi I am getting cron logs but only for CMD and INFO not for errors.
What should i do to get the error logs of cronjobs.
I purposely created a cronjob in crontab which will run a shell script which does not exist..it should log error in cron logs but it is not doing so..