Crontab : Permission denied

Question

My crontab (running as user) contains the following command

00-59 00-23 * * *  /usr/bin/smbget -R smb://192.168.10.32/Data -u USER -p PASSWORD

But I am getting an error as

You don't have enough permissions to access smb://192.168.10.32/Data/

But the same command I can execute (running as user) from command line.

How to give permissions to crontab to solve the issue?

Answer 1

I had the same problem, and it took me about 6 hours to work out the answer. You get it for free:

When you are logged in properly, you will have an environment variable USER=root - this will not be in your environment when you run a job from crontab.

To set an environment variable for one command in crontab, simply put it directly before your command (i.e. after the time/day specification). So in your case:

00-59 00-23 * * *  USER=root /usr/bin/smbget -R smb://192.168.10.32/Data -u USER -p PASSWORD

Answer 2

I would set up Autofs to take care of mounting the SMB file system. You can use a credentials file to keep it a bit more secure. From there, your cronjob is simply cp /mnt/smbshare/data /home/whomever/whereever.

Autofs won't leave the SMB share mounted forever, and it will help you eliminate the hassle of trying to figure out those SMB tools inside cron.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autofs