mysqldump and cron

Great Scott,

The problem with crontab is that it does not have a $PATH variable. As such, sh can NOT find the mysqldump command. As I see it, there are 2 ways around this problem.

1)Specify the full path to the executable. So instead of mysqldump, try /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump

2)Instead of running the command from the crontab, you could have crontab launch a script. In the script make sure to set the $PATH variable to include the mysql directory.

Just so you know, crontab sends its output to mail. You can read the mail by typing:

$ mail

But mail is an old unix application. If you would like to send the mail to your mail account create a .forward file like this:

$ echo 'yourAccount@yourISP.com'>.forward

Then mail will send the output to your regular mail.

I hope this is of some help.

Your humble unix geek,




Kurt

But mail is an old unix application. If you would
like to send the mail to your mail account create a
.forward file like this:

$ echo 'yourAccount@yourISP.com '>.forward

Then mail will send the output to your regular mail.

And here's another handy crontab trick: you can also redirect the mail output to different accounts. Just add this line:

<pre class="command">MAILTO = name@domain.com</pre>before your cron jobs that you want to go to that email address. You can add a different email address later in the crontab before another set of jobs and the output from those jobs will go to the other email address.

charlie

Dear Charles,

Thank you for the handy crontab trick. I will try it tonight.

Your gullible unix geek,




Kurt