Finally fixing that annoying Cron gotcha
A while ago I went through my server and reworked my storage setup. As discribed in that blog post, I set up daily backups to Backblaze B2 using their amazing CLI through a cron script. A day went by and I noticed that the healthcheck didn't pass. Unfortunately I didn't have time to fix this problem immediately, so instead I executed the command by hand every couple of days. One could argue that this in total took way more time than the actual fix, but hey, I was lazy. In the end, I finally dedicated some time to fix this annoying issue.
It turns out that a command executed by cron doesn't run through sh or bash,
but in a minimal environment without your usual environment-variables. As a
result, my b2 command (and many other commands for that matter) won't run as
expected, if at all. A quick fix is to run your command through bash or sh
explicitly:
sh -c "mycommand"
Alternatively, if you want all your entries to use sh or bash, you can set the
SHELL variable at the very beginning of your crontab:
SHELL=/bin/bash
15 1 * * * some_command
Here is an answer that goes into more detail about this. Have a great day!
This is post 019 of #100DaysToOffload.