I have all my functions stored in a file and normally I would just “source” them at the beginning of my scripts. This was working as expected until I tried to run a script using crontab. It seems to me as soon as I try to do something like “. <my file>”, whatever follows will just get ignored. For example, I have the following test script:

echo "before" > /tmp/tchaulog
. /home/tchau/bin/funcs.ksh
echo "after" >> /tmp/tchaulog

After the run, I only see “before” in the log file.

Would anyone be able to help me get around this problem? Your help is much appreciated. Thanks.

TS Chau

When a script runs from the command line, but fails from cron, it's because the environment isn't the same.

1) Make sure your environmental variables such as PATH are defined in the script. Cron's environment is different.

2) Since you apparently are using ksh, make sure that each script has the shell invocation:

#/bin/ksh

at the top of each script (line 1). cron, in my cases, uses the Bourne shell, sh, by default.