I have this backup script that I am trying to run overnight as a cron job. It works fine as standalone script. Backs up every folder. I have it setup as root (sudo crontab -e). But as a cron job it only backs up the first folder ("/home"), but none of the others. Any thoughts on what might be happening? Also, I'll take any suggestions on my overall approach as well.
outputFile="/mnt/synology/"$now"_backup.tar.gz"
inputFiles="/home"
inputFiles+=" /var/www" #webpages for apache
inputFiles+=" /etc/fstab" #needed to mount synology share drive on /mnt
inputFiles+=" /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf" #to keep resolvd dead, so it doesn't interfere with ubound
inputFiles+=" /etc/ufw/*.*" #to get all the firewall rules setup under ufw
inputFiles+=" /etc/apache2/sites-available/*.*" #apache websites available
inputFiles+=" /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/*.cnf" #to allow nonlocal access into mysql server. It allows from everywhere. Y>inputFiles+=" /etc/samba/*.conf" #samba config
inputFiles+=" /etc/unbound/*.conf" #unbound configuration files
inputFiles+=" /var/spool/cron" #crontab config files
sudo tar czf $outputFile --exclude=".*" $inputFiles
The problem turned out to be a missing shebang line in the script. The first line should be something like:
#!/bin/bash
...to tell the system to run the script with bash, rather than whatever its default shell is. Which shell is used as a default can be hard to predict, so it's best to specify it explicitly, especially if you're using any bash extensions to the basic shell syntax (like +=). If you don't know what's a bash extension, use a bash shebang just in case.