Trying to stop a service with cron

Question

On my Ubuntu 11.04 server when I try to run

 service powernap stop

as a cron job with the root user, it fails and gives me this message in syslog

 NAS CRON[10853]: (CRON) error (grandchild #10854 failed with exit status 2)

and this is emailed to the root users email account

 exec: 129: stop: not found

I can start and stop the powernap service from the command line so why doesn't it work from cron?

did you try /usr/sbin/service powernap stop ? i.e. the full path to service — fossfreedom, Jul 05 '11 at 20:19

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 05 '11 at 20:40

4

Looks like /sbin is not in $PATH when starting it from cron. Add a line like

PATH = /sbin:$PATH

to the crontab file.

answered Jul 05 '11 at 20:40

Florian Diesch

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Without spaces around `=`, of course – enzotib Jul 05 '11 at 21:02
In crontab it should work with the spaces (unlike in a sh compatibel shell) – Florian Diesch Jul 05 '11 at 21:19
Thanks Florian, this worked (and I did include the spaces between the =) – Luke Stapley Jul 09 '11 at 07:01
Had the same issue. Cron was setting PATH to /usr/bin:/bin. Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path in my script fixed it right up. – m0j0 Dec 21 '11 at 15:34
For some reason this did not work for me. I still have to investigate why. $PATH was not evaluated in the expression. This worked for me: PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin – rosch Aug 17 '12 at 13:37

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 05 '11 at 20:54

2

Hmmm...it's strange that cron is trying to run "stop"...

Try making cron run this instead:

sh -c '/usr/sbin/service powernap stop'

answered Jul 05 '11 at 20:54

Andrew Gunnerson

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`/usr/sbin/service` is a shell script that is trying to run `stop` (which is `sbin/stop`) here. – Florian Diesch Jul 05 '11 at 21:21
@Florian: I didn't know that. Thanks for the information. – Andrew Gunnerson Jul 06 '11 at 05:04
thanks, I'm going to try both these sugestions, even though I have no idea what sh -c is. What does it do? – Luke Stapley Jul 07 '11 at 18:30
This just gave me a different error message CRON[11394]: (CRON) error (grandchild #11395 failed with exit status 127), but thanks for your help anyway. – Luke Stapley Jul 09 '11 at 07:03

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 07 '11 at 19:58

I've had exactly this issue, and it would appear that the $PATH variable is completely empty when crontab is run, so it's not enough to put PATH=/usr/sbin;$PATH at the top of the crontab list.

So, what I did was (since I'm running this crontab as root, so I can turn off the squid proxy):

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

and it seems to have worked.

Trying to stop a service with cron

3 Answers3