cron problem

[Barry Brimer]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 m.roth2006 at rcn.com wrote:

> Ok, folks, I'm going nuts. I've set up a cron job to run a script to back up Oracle. In the crontab entry, I've got it piping stdout and stderr to append to a logfile. It runs late every Thursday night.
>
> Well, allegedly.
>
> I find entries in /var/log/cron saying it ran... but there's no backup, and no log. Just this week, I added set -x in the script.
>
> Nada.
>
> Any suggestions? Oh, and yes, if I run it manually, it works just fine. The no output log *really* drives me nuts....

Any chance that this script is relying on environment variables that are 
available in your current session, but would not be in the cron execution? 
Are you sourcing any needed environment in the script?  Is there anything 
in the email that cron sends to the user who owns the cron job that would 
give more information?

Barry