Need help setting up cron

[Luca Ferrari]

On Thursday 17 July 2008 Robert Dailey's cat, walking on the keyboard, wrote:
> I found out that my script was broken. After fixing it, however, I
> noticed that my directories were being created, but it didn't seem to
> be doing anything else. Note that this script is performing a backup
> and then compressing files. This process can take up to 30 minutes or
> maybe more. The first thing the script is supposed to do is create a
> subversion repository dump file which is about 600MB in size. 20
> minutes after the script was executed, I noticed my dump file was
> created but it was 0 bytes in size. It's almost as if the script was
> prematurely interrupted and wasn't given enough time to finish.

I had similar problems with backup scripts and cron, especially when involving 
ssh tasks. If the script runs fine from an interactive shell and does not 
from cron, try setting the environment variables as for your interactive 
shell. In the crontab palce an entry like:
ENV=/home/myself/.profile

and log your backup output to a file to see if it is working and where it is 
stopping:

30 12 * * * root /my/script/file > /tmp/debug.log

Hope this helps,
Luca