crontab PATH and USER

Question

I am new to scheduling tasks with cron and crontab. I am trying to schedule execution of a task as if I had logged on, opened a terminal, and executed it myself.

Ho

Answer 1

According to "man 5 crontab" you can set environment variables in your crontab, by writing them before your cron lines.

There is also an example of a crontab so you just have to copy/paste it :

$ man 5 crontab | grep -C5 PATH | tail 
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow usercommand
17 * * * *  root  cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * *  root  test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6 * * 7  root  test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )

So you can adjust your PATH or any environment variable to whatever you want. But this example seems enough for typical cases.