Hi,

Does anyone know how to help me out with a rather bizarre problem? I have a cron job that's tar-ing and gzipping a directory (for a website), and it runs fine if I run it from the command line as root, but if I run it from cron (as root - in the /etc/cron.daily/ folder), it consistently fails on certain jpgs. The error message when unzipping and untar-ing the file to check for errors is "unexpected end of file" or something similar.

Here's the command:

tar -zcvpf /var/backup/site.tgz --directory /var/www/html .

Any help appreciated!!

Thanks, Tom

I think it could be because:

When you run it from the shell (manually) your environment is all setup. So you can use simple commands (ie tar, gzip, ls) as opposed to typing those commands with the full path (ie /bin/tar, /bin/ls).

However when you run it from a cron, you are not logged in so there is no environment setup. Therefore when the machine reads the command tar or ls, it has no idea what your talking about. Try using the full path in your cron script

you may want to check to make sure that your backup directory allows write access for the cron user (I am assuming cron does not run as root). Cron will also need read access to the web sight's directories.

Mike