[flexbackup-help] flexbackup and cron

[tm t. <tm....@gm...>]

Hello guys
just wanted to post something I found out and that was undocumented in the
flexbackup manual, that might be helpful for people who are doing their
backup by flexbackup and cron.

I had flexbackup completing always when launched by command line and not
completing when launched indentically by the /etc/crontab file.
Same thing when written my own script, using flexbackup.
After many tests I found out that there was a difference between the PATH=
line in /etc/crontab and the PATH of the root user for an interactive login.

When launched in interactive mode, my flexbackup script would use different
commands/scripts than when launched by /etc/crontab.

I checked the PATH of the interactive root shell this way:
sudo bash
echo $PATH
and it was:
/usr/lib/kde4/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

Then
I updated the PATH= line at the beginning of the /etc/crontab file with
the same settings as before and everything worked perfectly.
The previous setting was probably missing /usr/lib/kde4/bin and
/usr/X11R6/bin and the other paths were in a different order (it was the
default of Linux 8.04 LTS)

Would be nice if the flexbackup team would point out which difference and
which specific file caused flexbackup not working when launched by the
default crontab.

And would be also very nice for cron users in a next release of flexbackup
to send the flexbackup.conf syntax OK message to STDOUT and not to STDERR,
as someone already filed in the bugtrack some years ago.

Tom