I have mythbackup set to run in my crontab every three days at 3am but for some reason it just fails every time and I end up getting two files (mythconverg.sql and savedfiles.tar.bz2) with sizes around 4KB. Running mythbackup by itself works fine, by the way. Here's what the relevant portion of /etc/crontab looks like.

What environment settings are missing? When you run interactively as root you have a different environment than when a cronjob or other automatically/remotely kicked off process is started. Put the full path to an executable script which does something like this in your /etc/crontab:


Then after that cron job has run, run the these commands interactively as root:

I'll guess that at the very least your PATH is different.

Alright it's a little different but most of it seems to be stuff like ssh connections and the like.

live.env.log (Took out ssh stuff as it had ports and unwanted info)


cron.env.log

Either of these could be an issue. Also, make sure you use the full path name to the script in your /etc/crontab

Well I changed the crontab to point to "/usr/local/bin/mythbackup" instead of just mythbackup so I'll see how that goes but both environments have /usr/local/bin in the path so I wonder if that's not the issue. What could be the issue if /bin/sh or /bin/bash are used?

The scripts use various bash features. If it really is emulating pure sh then some of those wouldn't work. If the full pathname doesn't work, we try telling it to run: