Re: tar from crontab bug

[Bob Proulx]

Sergei Vorobyov wrote:
> 1. when manually invoked from konsole (xterm), 
>    tar cvzf z2.tgz 200*/
> 2. however, when the same command is run automatically from the crontab
>    36 20 * * * tar cvzf z1.tgz 200*/
> then the subsequent tar tvzf z1.tgz reveals that z1.tgz is corrupted:

Note that the shell run by cron to execute that command will almost
certainly be '/bin/sh' while the command line version is whatever
shell you normally use, which may be quite different.  Hopefully that
is not even close to the problem though.

To debug that problem further you might run your tar command inside of
a shell script and run the shell script from the crontab.  Then the
shell will be known and specified, #!/bin/sh is a good choice.  That
gives you many more debugging options than the one line in the
crontab.

Bob