Bash script runs manually, but fails on crontab

Question

I'm a newbie to shell scripting. I have written a shell script to do incremental backup of MySQL database.The script is in executable format and runs successfully when executed manually but fails when executed through crontab.

Crontab entry is like this :

*/1 * * * * /home/db-backup/mysqlbackup.sh

Below is the shell script code -

#!/bin/sh
MyUSER="root"       # USERNAME
MyPASS="password"         # PASSWORD
MyHOST="localhost"  # Hostname
Password="" #Linux Password

MYSQL="$(which mysql)"
if [ -z "$MYSQL" ]; then
echo "Error: MYSQL not found"
exit 1
fi
MYSQLADMIN="$(which mysqladmin)"
if [ -z "$MYSQLADMIN" ]; then
    echo "Error: MYSQLADMIN not found"
    exit 1
fi
CHOWN="$(which chown)"
if [ -z "$CHOWN" ]; then
    echo "Error: CHOWN not found"
    exit 1
fi
CHMOD="$(which chmod)"
if [ -z "$CHMOD" ]; then
    echo "Error: CHMOD not found"
    exit 1
fi

GZIP="$(which gzip)"
if [ -z "$GZIP" ]; then
    echo "Error: GZIP not found"
    exit 1
fi
CP="$(which cp)"
if [ -z "$CP" ]; then
    echo "Error: CP not found"
    exit 1
fi
MV="$(which mv)"
if [ -z "$MV" ]; then
    echo "Error: MV not found"
    exit 1
fi
RM="$(which rm)"
if [ -z "$RM" ]; then
    echo "Error: RM not found"
    exit 1
fi
RSYNC="$(which rsync)"
if [ -z "$RSYNC" ]; then
    echo "Error: RSYNC not found"
    exit 1
fi

MYSQLBINLOG="$(which mysqlbinlog)"
if [ -z "$MYSQLBINLOG" ]; then
    echo "Error: MYSQLBINLOG not found"
    exit 1
fi
# Get data in dd-mm-yyyy format
NOW="$(date +"%d-%m-%Y-%T")"

DEST="/home/db-backup"
mkdir $DEST/Increment_backup.$NOW
LATEST=$DEST/Increment_backup.$NOW
$MYSQLADMIN -u$MyUSER -p$MyPASS flush-logs
newestlog=`ls -d /usr/local/mysql/data/mysql-bin.?????? | sed 's/^.*\.//' | sort -g | tail -n 1`
echo $newestlog
for file in `ls /usr/local/mysql/data/mysql-bin.??????`
do
        if [ "/usr/local/mysql/data/mysql-bin.$newestlog" != "$file" ]; then
     echo $file             
     $CP "$file" $LATEST         
        fi
done
for file1 in `ls $LATEST/mysql-bin.??????`
do
 $MYSQLBINLOG $file1>$file1.$NOW.sql 
 $GZIP -9 "$file1.$NOW.sql"     
 $RM "$file1"
done
$RSYNC -avz $LATEST /home/rsync-back

• First of all, when scheduled on crontab it is not showing any errors. How can I get to know whether the script is running or not?
• Secondly, what is the correct way to execute the shell script in a crontab. Some blogs suggest for change in environment variables. What would be the best solution

When I did $echo PATH, I got this

/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/opt/android-sdk-linux/tools:/opt/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools:~/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-6/bin

Answer 1

The problem is probably that your $PATH is different in the manual environment from that under which crontab runs. Hence, which can't find your executables. To fix this, first print your path in the manual environment (echo $PATH), and then manually set up PATH at the top of the script you run in crontab. Or just refer to the programs by their full path.

Edit: Add this near the top of your script, before all the which calls:

export PATH="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/opt/android-sdk-linux/tools:/opt/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools:~/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-6/bin"