How to get CRON to call in the correct PATHs

Question

I\'m trying to get cron to call in the correct PATHs. When I run a Python script from shell the script runs fine as it uses the PATHs set in bashrc but when I use cron all t

Answer 1

Most likely, cron is running in a very sparse environment. Check the environment variables cron is using by appending a dummy job which dumps env to a file like this:

* * * * * env > env_dump.txt

Compare that with the output of env in a normal shell session.

You can prepend your own environment variables to the local crontab by defining them at the top of your crontab.

Here's a quick fix to prepend $PATH to the current crontab:

# echo PATH=$PATH > tmp.cron
# echo >> tmp.cron
# crontab -l >> tmp.cron
# crontab tmp.cron

The resulting crontab will look similar to chrissygormley's answer, with PATH defined before the crontab rules.