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svnshellcronawkquoting

svn | awk | mail works in bash, but not in cron job

I have the following command to show changes to a subversion repository

svn log -v -r{$(date +%Y-%m-%d)}:HEAD http://therepository | awk '/^r[0-9]+ / {user=$3} {if (user=="username") {print $1 $2 $3}}' | mail -ne -s'Users SVN commits' email@email.com

It works fine in the command line.

When I paste it into a crontab, I get the following error message:

/bin/sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)'
/bin/sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

How does this need to be quoted to work?

Solution

  • When using cron, avoid the hassle of such issues by putting everything into a shell script, then call the shell script from cron.

    This approach is commonly used and a good idea because:

    • It makes your command easily testable (you don't have to do stupid things like schedule an execution in one minute's time)
    • Easy to manually invoke if you have to, eg in case the job failed, ops can re-run without touching crontab - also jobs can be invoked from other jobs, eg a final job that checks if all jobs ran OK and re-runs those that didn't
    • It separates what is executed from when it's executed - leaving cron to do (only) what it does best: scheduling
    • It gives you full access to shell script features, or using different shells like perl
    • It keeps crontab clean and easy to read
    • Anyone developing/maintaining cron tasks knows where to look if you use a consistent directory for cron tasks (eg /opt/cron or whatever)
    • You can put your cron tasks under source control - too often shell scripts are overlooked for source control, but they are code and therefore benefit from source control

    For example:

    dosomething.sh:

svn log -v -r{$(date +%Y-%m-%d)}:HEAD http://therepository | awk '/^r[0-9]+ / {user=$3} {if (user=="username") {print $1 $2 $3}}' | mail -ne -s'Users SVN commits' email@email.com

    plus

    cron 0 22 * * * /opt/cron/dosomething.sh