Cron job does NOT get the environment variables set in .bashrc

Question

Here is my cron job:

plee@dragon:~$ crontab -l
* * * * * /bin/bash -l -c \'source ~/.bashrc; echo $EDITOR > /tmp/cronjob.test\'

and insi

Answer 1

The reason for source ~/.bashrc not working is the contents on your ~/.bashrc (default one from Ubuntu 12.04). If you look in it you will see on lines 5 and 6 the following:

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

PS1 variable is set for an interactive shell, so it's absent when run via cron, even though you are executing it as a login shell. This is confirmed by contents of the file produced by /bin/bash -l -c -x 'source ~/.bashrc; echo $EDITOR > /tmp/cronjob.test':

+ source /home/plee/.bashrc
++ '[' -z '' ']'
++ return

To make source ~/.bashrc work, comment out the line that checks for presence of the PS1 variable in ~/.bashrc:

#[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

This will make bash execute the entire contents of ~/.bashrc via cron