MisterX Tech

If you ever see this from a crron script :

$FILE_RUN_FROM_CRON: line $LINE: $COMMAND: command not found
Error: (CLI:043) Invalid shell command syntax.

Then you likely:

• Forgot to setup a proper PATH in your script
• You declared a variable but didnt use it or the file isnt in the setup PATH (ie set VAR1=/usr/local/bin/crazybinary but then just used  crazybinary in the script)
• messed up something in a /etc/profile.d/ file
• Likely more but ….

I run across this from time to time due to typos I make and thought the internet at large might benefit. Don’t forget cron has a limited environment by default ! Lots of ways on the net to fix this but this error was a little more hidden so I thought I would help it get some google love! For those that wanted to know about how different the cron environment is here is a (near) default RHEL6 environment:

SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILTO=
USER=root
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
PWD=/root
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHLVL=1
HOME=/root
LOGNAME=root
_=/bin/env

Quite Spartan !