Cron Environment

February 14, 2021 · One min read

Cron often runs in an almost empty environment.

The default path is very minimal. Therefore you should either use absolute paths or explicitly set the PATH variable when using binaries.

Solutions:

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

# or

5 4 * * sun /absolute/path/to/the/binary

If you decide to set the PATH variable, you can’t append :$PATH:

PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" # does not work