From: Thien Vuong <tvuong@...>
Date: 2003-03-31T12:12:31+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby and cron help

Mark Probert wrote:
> Hi, rubyists.
> 
> I think this is more a cron rather than a ruby problem.
> However, I am stumped.
> 
> I am running ruby 1.6.8 under Solaris 6.
> 
> wcary3zg:~/src/ruby/utils% crontab -l                                     
> 0,15,30,45 * * * * /opt/home/mark/bin/blah
> 
> wcary3zg:~/src/ruby/utils% cat ~/bin/blah
> #! /usr/local/bin/zsh
> cd ~/src/ruby/utils
> /usr/local/bin/ruby timestamp.rb > ~/tmp/timestamp.out
> /usr/local/bin/ruby blah.rb > ~/tmp/blah.out
> 
> timestamp.rb contains "puts Time.now" just to show that
> ruby is working ok.  blah.rb is the application I am 
> really interested in.  Running "blah" from the command
> line works fine.  It fails to work from cron, though
> the command is executed (from /var/cron/log) and the
> timestamp.out file is updated.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 

Just to make sure all the output from the command are captured,
you may want to do this.

cd ~/src/ruby/utils
/usr/local/bin/ruby timestamp.rb > ~/tmp/timestamp.out 2>&1
/usr/local/bin/ruby blah.rb > ~/tmp/blah.out 2>&1

and check the output

Also, if your login shell is not of the csh variety, try testing
it with

rsh localhost /opt/home/mark/bin/blah

This emulates pretty well the cron execution environment.  cron
run a program with almost none of your environment, so you need to
setup most environment variables that is normally in .profile/.cshrc