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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Can't get crontab to run backup script properly (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by theRealBassist to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello everyone!

I'm running a few different services off of my Ubuntu VM on ProxMox, and they've all been running great for about 6 months now. However, I'm trying to setup some better backups and such of individual services, and I wrote a bash script to do that for me and delete older backups once I accumulate enough.

All of that works 100% fine. Like absolutely no issues with the script when I run it myself. However, I can not for the life of me get crontab to run it.

If I run sudo ./folder/directory/backup.sh then everything runs perfectly. However, if I setup my crontab with 0 * * * * ./folder/directory/backup.sh I get absolutely nothing.

I have also tried setting the crontab with sudo, sh, sudo sh, and both combinations without the dot in front of the path to the shell script.

Does anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thank you so much for any help

Update: I have edited /etc/crontab with the following 0 * * * * * root /mnt/nas/freshrss/backups/backup.sh. After waiting for the crontab to fire off, nothing happened. Still not really sure what's going on.

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[–] theRealBassist 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have edited /etc/crontab with the following 0 * * * * * root /mnt/nas/freshrss/backups/backup.sh. After waiting for the crontab to fire off, nothing happened.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There's an extra *. There should be 5 time fields, but there's a zero followed by 5 *s. If that's not what's causing it, next spot I'd check is output from the cron logs. Not sure where that is in Ubuntu, though, might be in/var/log/messages or in the systemd journal. Cron sometimes sends mail when there's an error, too, so checking the users mail might give you some clues as well.