Re: How to start program in cron script?

[Carey Evans <c.evans@clear.net.nz>]

news.spiegl@kascada.com (Andy Spiegl) writes:

> I am giving up.  For at least an hour I tried to write a
> shell script (t obe run by cron) that start another program
> and sends it into the background.

[snip]

> But no matter how I did it, I ended up with the program running
> as it should but the starting shell script (let's call it test.sh)
> became a zombie:  Output from "ps auxwwwww":
> 
>  spiegl   32585  1.7  0.0     0     0 Z      0:00 (test.sh <zombie>)

I would guess that:

 1. cron doesn't monitor for its children exiting;
 2. cron waits for everything sending output its way to exit before
    exiting itself.  "ps afx" can be instructive for working out
    _whose_ zombie test.sh is.

To fix this, you need to stop "myprogram" from sending any output to
cron.  My recommendation would be:

    0 8 * * * /usr/local/bin/myprogram >/dev/null 2>&1 &

if you don't care at all about the output, or

    0 8 * * * /usr/local/bin/myprogram 2>&1 | /usr/bin/logger -i -t myprogram >/dev/null 2>&1 &

(all on one line, of course) to send any output to the syslog.

-- 
	 Carey Evans  http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/c.evans/

			   Close your eyes.