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artfulrobot
Asked: 2015-03-27 02:56:05 +0800 CST

What shell is used by cron?

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cron runs shell commands from crontabs.

But having just got caught out by the differences between zsh and bash, I'm now concerned that I don't know which shell cron uses to interpret crontab commands? Obviously the simple case where the cron entry just points to a script file is handled by the #!/path/to/interpreter on the first line, but what when you have something more complex in cron?

I looked in /etc/cron* and can't see anything that might allow this to be set or changed?

debian

2 Answers

  1. The crontab(5) manpage deals with your query by default it's /bin/sh

    Several environment variables are set up automatically by the cron(8) daemon. SHELL is set to /bin/sh, and LOGNAME and HOME are set from the /etc/passwd line of the crontab?s owner. HOME and SHELL may be over- ridden by settings in the crontab; LOGNAME may not.

    so adding 

    SHELL=/bin/bash

    to the crontab file would change the shell accordingly.

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  2. Best Answer

    You can put SHELL=/bin/bash in your crontab - you can also point to a .bashrc using BASH_ENV="/root/.bashrc". That should get you going. I actually don't know what happens if you don't have SHELL defined, but adding it to crontab makes it easy to tell what is what.

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