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I'm trying to run an hourly python script. My crontab looks like this:

crontab -l
0 * * * * "/common/.../www/concat.py /common/.../www"

as an output I get this:

/bin/sh: /common/.../www/concat.py /common/.../www: No such file or directory

It makes no difference if I leave away the "" in the crontab. The argument is needed to set the current working directory in python. What am I doing wrong?

Found the bug:

0 * * * * needs to have a space as a whitespace. I used tabs.

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Does the command work at all when typed in a terminal? – m4573r Sep 26 '12 at 16:12
yes it does. I copied it and pasted it and it worked. – Benedikt Wutzi Sep 26 '12 at 16:14
1  
What is the /.../ ? – RedGrittyBrick Sep 26 '12 at 16:22
a bit I left out, because it is running on an official machine with official usernames – Benedikt Wutzi Sep 26 '12 at 16:24
Is this a cron job for the root user or a "regular" user? Could it be that the user that you have created the cron job for, does not have privileges to access the files/folders that you have specified? – p_strand Sep 26 '12 at 16:52

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

Try it without the quotation marks around the command in crontab

You really don't have a file named /common/.../www/concat.py /common/.../www

Note that "concat.py " would be a valid directory name just as "Program FIles" is a valid directory name - the space is part of the name. Names containing spaces are quoted.

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I already tried that. – Benedikt Wutzi Sep 26 '12 at 16:29
@BenediktWutzi: try it again :-) – RedGrittyBrick Sep 26 '12 at 16:32

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