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

In our environment, we typically don't have this issue as root is the only cron allowed and each command is typically ran as an application specific user VIA a su -c command as:

su - myuser -c "/usr/local/scripts/app.sh" 2>&1

since the "-" option is specified we get myuser's profile and environment. We recently had an issue with a command that needed root's authority to complete successfully, so we just issued the command without the su -c. After some amount of research, it dawned on us that the easiest way to get root's environment is to use the same technique for root as we do for all other applications so we issued:

su - root -c "/usr/local/scripts/app.sh" 2>&1