cron won't run shell script that works in terminal

Well, from your post, the most obvious problem is that you:

a) named your script scriptname.sh

but b) setup cron to run a completely different command:

00 19 * * 1 /Users//Documents/Scripts/\ iphone\ archive.sh

' iphone archive.sh' is not the same as 'scriptname.sh'

Just in case you obfuscated one, but not the other name, does the script name really begin with a space?

Also, did you remove the username from the posted path? because '/Users//Documents...' is not going to be a valid path.

Ultimately, though, crontab functionality has largely been moved into launchd which has a different control mechanism. It may be worth moving to that instead.

Colons are path separators.

This is the default environment inside of a cron job

PWD:    /Users/me

id -a:  uid=501(me)
        gid=501(me)
        groups=501(me),
               204(_developer),
               100(_lpoperator),
                98(_lpadmin),
                80(admin),
                61(localaccounts),
                12(everyone)

$#:     0  # no command line arguments.

printenv:
        SHELL=/bin/sh
        USER=me
        PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
        PWD=/Users/me
        SHLVL=1
        HOME=/Users/me
        LOGNAME=me
        _=/usr/bin/printenv

If your cron job is working, then just move on. Extra stuff in PATH is not harmful if it is not used, and if it is needed to find the commands you use, then it is beneficial.

The point I'm trying to make is that a cron environment is not the same as an interactive login, where you run shell initialization scripts.

And unless you explicitly invoke another shell, you get /bin/sh which does not have all the magic that bash or zsh has.

The default user shell is zsh.

But since the beginning of Unix, any command run from another program get /bin/sh as its shell.

cron

system() library call

perl -e 'print `command` '

awk 'BEGIN{ "command" | getline; print }'

etc...

If you want a different shell, you have to make that happen.

#!/bin/zsh

as the first line of a script will use zsh as the shell.

BUT the script must be executable

chmod +x /path/to/script

I would strongly suggest you not have any spaces in your script path, including the script name. Unix is very unfriendly to file names with spaces. Unix can deal with spaces in file names, but at a cost to you in time and frustration.

I have been working with Unix since 1985 and Macs since 1988, and macOS files and folders with spaces in them still trip me up. And I am not a casual user. I spend my days working in Terminal sessions ssh’ed into Unix systems from my Mac writing C source code, shell scripts, awk scripts, perl scripts, etc… during my work day. I am very familiar with getting caught by macOS files with spaces.

cron starts tasks with a minimum number of environment variables, and a very default PATH environment variable.

many people get tripped up by PATH in a cron script.

zero7404 wrote:

so the default shell is not zsh in mac OS ? thought it was, but my script is calling zsh anyway.

zsh is the default shell. But for unattended, automated tests, it is always better to make no assumptions about the user interface shell environment and use only the basic /bin/sh shell.