Can't kill application with cron

geek_man · 08-10-2008, 11:51 PM

Hi!

I have a script that gets the PID of Exaile and kills it. It works well, but when I try to execute this script with cron it doesn't work. My cron is working fine, because in the script I included an echo to a file, just to see if it was working with cron, and it does the echo.

Is it because you can't kill applications with cron?

I am using Fedora 9.

Thanks.

Mr. C. · 08-11-2008, 12:08 AM

There is no such restriction in cron. Standard permissions apply.

Which user / group is the process running under?

Which user's crontab tries to kill the process above?

geek_man · 08-11-2008, 10:00 AM

Hi!

The user who is executing the cron is my personal user, not root. The
crontab is the one of my user.
The problem is that it can execute any other command but the kill.

Thanks.

Mr. C. · 08-11-2008, 10:06 AM

And what does ps show for the process' UID and GID?

geek_man · 08-11-2008, 10:43 AM

Hi!

$ ps -ef | grep exaile

Shows the same PID as top, I did not check the UID and GID, as soon as I get home, I will check it. The problem here is that if I execute the script from the terminal it kills exaile, but when cron executes the script it does not work.

I was wondering if SELinux could be the problem.

Thanks.

trickykid · 08-11-2008, 01:21 PM

What do your logs indicate when it attempts to run the kill script? Are you specifying the full path to the kill command in this script, usually it's a PATH issue when it comes to cron problems? My other question is, why do you need a cron job to kill a PID?

chrism01 · 08-12-2008, 12:53 AM

Show us the script/cmd in cron.