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Table of Contents

• typical crontab
• enter SHELL

original article from: http://shtylman.com/post/cron-shell-power/ - archived for importance.

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If you don't know what cron is this post is not for you.

Using the SHELL variable in cron is more powerful than you may realize.

typical crontab

Most people will have this type of setup in their crontab.

NODE_ENV=production
OTHER_VAR=foo

*/10 * * * * /path/to/node /path/to/my/script.js

If you don't want to repeat /path/to/node (or your runtime) over and over, you will add a PATH variable to go with the other variables.

But what happens if you want to use something like nvm or rvm or virtualenv, etc? It is not uncommon to have the above change to something like the following

*/10 * * * * /path/to/my/launcher.sh
*/10 * * * * /path/to/my/launcher_another.sh

Now you have several shell scripts which invoke the required commands to setup the environment and then run whatever program.

enter SHELL

There is a little known special env variable for cron: SHELL. Most people know this variable can be used to change the shell your scripts run run (i.e. SHELL=/bin/bash), but it can actually run any file!

So lets say I use nvm and want to setup my environment. Instead of making custom launchers for each command, I can simply do the following:

SHELL=/path/to/setup/cron.bash

*/10 * * * * node $HOME/foo.js

Now lets look at what cron.bash might look like:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

source /etc/environment
source /etc/profile

# setup any env variables you want here
export NODE_ENV=production

# I use node so I want to add node path stuff via npm
# $HOME is available, but not many other env vars are by default
source $HOME/nvm/nvm.sh

# restore SHELL env var for cron
SHELL=/bin/bash
# execute the cron command in an actual shell
exec /bin/bash --norc "$@"

For the most part it looks just like any other shell script. The important magical parts are the last 4 lines. These lines put back the SHELL variable to /bin/bash and then execute a bash shell to run the cronline command (the stuff for the specific cronjob).

SHELL=/full/path/to/cron.bash
MAILTO=cron@example.com

# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command

# dummy cron command to print the environment variables ever minute
* * * * * env

# node scripts can simply be run using `node` now
* * * * * node /path/to/script/.js

Now our cron files have a consistent environment setup and we can simply run whatever commands we need without further PATH tricks or nonsense.

Go forth and update your dirty crontabs!

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Tags: bash , cron , env , nodejs , shell , tutorials , zsh