[WBEL-users] makewhatis errors

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 10:27:53AM -0700, Jesse wrote:
> 
> Anyone else seeing makewhatis errors in their cron since the latest batch
> of updates?
> 
> I'm seeing:
> 
> /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron:
> 
> zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
> 
> on multiple machines each night. When I run makewhatis by hand I don't
> have any errors. On some machines, the cron report has multiple zcat
> messages.
> 
> I haven't had a chacne to really investigate what's going on (doesn't help
> that running makewhatis.cron by hand generates no errors), but was curious
> if anyone else is encountering it.

That's a classic sign of either a tty error (your application needs
a real tty), or that your environment (generally the PATH variable),
isn't set up correctly. 

When I set "makewhatis.cron" to run out of root's cron entry:

16 14 * * * /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron 2>&1 | mail -s "makewhatis cron" kbohling@birddog.com

This is what I get:
/etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron: line 12: makewhatis: command not found

How are you getting the results back from cron?  I don't see
anything in my root's mail directory that has "makewhatis" in the
mail spool.  Even when I try and limit the environment, the script
still works (setting up the PATH, SHELL, MAILTO, and HOME to what is
in "/etc/crontab" ).

Generally, when something doesn't work for me out of cron, it's a
sign that the environment is wrong, or the application I am using
behaves differently when run a tty.

Thanks,
	Kirby



> 
> Best regards,
> 
> ---
> Jesse <j@lumiere.net>
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