*BSD News Article 20736


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!buhrow
From: buhrow@cats.ucsc.edu (Brian Buhrow)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Re: Problems with new execle() in NetBSD 0.9
Date: 10 Sep 1993 21:41:53 GMT
Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz
Lines: 35
Message-ID: <26qsb1INN1e3@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
References: <26l67i$6qs@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <26o88r$heb@pessoa.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hobbes.ucsc.edu


In article <26o88r$heb@pessoa.ecs.soton.ac.uk> rsk@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bob Kemp) writes:
>In <26l67i$6qs@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> burgess@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (Dave Burgess) writes:
>
>>/usr/bin/finger	nasanews@space.mit.edu > /etc/nasanews: No such file or directory
>O
>
>I've been getting this message from crond too but _only_ for root's crontab.
>In my own (non-root) crontab arguments to commands work fine.
>I agree that the shell used seems to be irrelevant.
>
>Presumably it is either crond or the exec code?
>
>Bob
>
>-- 
>
>Robert Kemp         Internet: rsk@ecs.soton.ac.uk       Phone: (0703) 59 31 22
>	ECS Dept, Southampton Univ, Highfield, Southampton, S09 5NH, UK


	Actually, I believe the bug is in the shell.  If you change the
environment variable in the root crontab file to csh, or something else, it
works properly.  Also, you can reproduce the same behavior from the root
prompt by typing:
sh -c <command of choice> <arguments>
you will get the message, "<command of choice> not found.  Try this with
csh and it works great!
So, the work-around is to put
SHELL=/bin/csh
in the crontab file for root to fix the problem.
	For some reason, sh -c <command of choice> for non-root types works
fine.  But, as I say, the bug is probably in the sh command line parser.
-Brian