Simple bash script runs asynchronously when run as a cron job - linux

I have a backup script written that will do the following in this order:
Zip up files via SSH on a remote backup server
Dump my local database
Transfer my local database via SSH rsync to the backup server
Now when I run this script from the command line in RHEL it works a-ok perfectly fine.
BUT when I set this script to run via a cronjob, the script does run, but from what I can tell, it's somehow running those above 3 commands simultaneously. Because of that, things are getting done out of order (my local database is completed dumping and transferred before the #1 zip job is actually complete).
Has anyone run across such a strange scenario? As the most simple fix, is there a way to force a script to run synchronously? Maybe add some kind of command to wait for the prior line to complete before moving on?
EDIT I added a example version of my backup script. It seems that the second line of my script runs at the same time as the first line of my script, so while the SSH command has been issued, it has not yet completed before my second line triggers and an SQL dump begins.
#!/bin/bash
THEDIR="sample"
THEDBNAME="mydatabase"
ssh -i /rsync/mirror-rsync-key sample#sample.com "tar zcvpf /$THEDIR/old-1.tar /$THEDIR/public_html/*"
mysqldump --opt -Q $THEDBNAME > mySampleDb
/usr/bin/rsync -avz --delete --exclude=**/stats --exclude=**/error -e "ssh -i /rsync/mirror-rsync-key" /$THEDIR/public_html/ sample#sample.com:/$THEDIR/public_html/
/usr/bin/rsync -avz --delete --exclude=**/stats --exclude=**/error -e "ssh -i /rsync/mirror-rsync-key" /$THEDIR/ sample#sample.com:/$THEDIR/

Unless you're explicitly using backgrounding (&) everything should run one-by-one, waiting until the prior finishes.
Perhaps you are actually seeing overlapping prior executions by cron? If so, you can prevent multi-execution by calling your script with flock
e.g. midnight cron entry from
0 0 * * * backup.sh
to
0 0 * * * flock -n /tmp/backup.lock -c backup.sh

If you want to run commands in a sequential order you can use ; operator.
; – semicolon operator
This operator Run multiple commands in one go, but in a sequential order. If we take three commands separated by semicolon, second command will run after first command completion, third command will run only after second command execution completes. One point we should know is that to run second command, it do not depend on first command exit status.
Execute ls, pwd, whoami commands in one line sequentially one after the other.
ls;pwd;whoami
Please correct me if i am not understanding your question correctly.

Related

How do I run 1 instance of rsync / rclone script using flock as a cron job?

I'm trying to run only one instance of my back up script as a cron job.
I know I can do it with a function that checks if the process is running:
if pgrep -x rclone >/dev/null
then
# rclone is still running, backup is not done yet, exit.
exit
else
# rclone is not running.
# start backup.
/path/to/rclone/script.sh
fi
But after some research, I found out flock should be used instead of looking for process ID, in crontab -e, in this case, run the script every 30 minutes:
*/30 * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /var/lock/myjob.lock /path/to/rclone/script.sh
Running the command above requires sudo. Therefore, the script asks for sudo password, and never runs. (I ran the command above manually, that's how I found out).
How exactly do I use flock? Do I type a variable in my script that injects the sudo password when flock asks for it? (I know it's not secure, so there must be a different way to do this).
I tried to research this subject but couldn't find any good answers that explain how to use it properly.
Thank you.

wget in script not working when called from cron

I've read a load of similar cases and can't for the life of me figure this one out...
I'm running a wget command inside a .sh script which is called from cron on reboot as follows:
#reboot /home/user/reboot_script.sh
The .sh script starts with
#!/bin/bash
And I have done chmod +x reboot_script.sh
The line that fails is :
Either
mac=$(</home/user/mac.txt)
Which may not be providing the content to the variable in the wget
OR
/usr/bin/wget "http://my.domain.com/$mac/line.txt" -O /home/user/line.txt
If I run the script from command line, it works absolutely fine but if it runs from the cron on reboot, the script runs, but line.txt is saved as an empty file (0 bytes). Again, if run directly from command line, it works fine.
I've looked at file permissions, absolute paths, everything I can think of, but I've been staring at this for hours now.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
#reboot is too early in boot process IMHO. You should create a systemd script to wait network.
As a workaround, you can add a
sleep 30
or better:
until ping -c1 domain.com &>/dev/null; do
sleep 5
done
before your wget

call parallelly function in shell script

i have an file serverlist file,reading the file and getting the server name and performing some operations on those servers using for loop and command used:/usr/local/bin/sshcmd -q -u $userName -s $serverName" and one command for execution tooks 5-7 minutes on the one server.
i don't want to run the command one by one on all servers but requires to run the command at least 15 servers parallelly at same time for saving the time .
You can run commands into background mode by adding '&' at end of command.
For example:
/usr/local/bin/sshcmd -q -u $userName1 -s $serverName1 &
/usr/local/bin/sshcmd -q -u $userName2 -s $serverName2 &
It is runs two copies of sshcmd parallely.

How do I run a bash script (that resides on a remote server) in windows task scheduler?

SOLVED
Scenario: I am a beginner in bash script, windows task scheduler and such. I am able to run a local bash script in my Windows Task Scheduler successfully.
Problem: I need to do this on many computers, thus I think storing just 1 copy of the bash script on a remote server may be of help. What my Task Scheduler needs to do is just to run the script and output a log. However, I can't get the correct syntax for the argument.
The below is what I have currently:
Program/Script: C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe
Argument (works successfully):
-l -c "ssh -p 222 ME#ME.com "httpdocs/bashscript.sh" >> /cygdrive/c/Users/ME/Desktop/`date +%Y%m%d`.log 2>&1"
Start in: C:\cygwin64\bin
Also had to make sure that the user account under Properties in Task Scheduler is correct, as mine was incorrect before. And need key authentication for ME#ME.com too.
For the password issue, you really should use ssh keys. I think your command would simply be ssh -p 222 ME#ME.com:.... I.e., just get rid of the --rsh stuff. – chrisaycock

How can I trigger a delayed system shutdown from in a shell script?

On my private network I have a backup server, which runs a bacula backup every night. To save energy I use a cron job to wake the server, but I haven't found out, how to properly shut it down after the backup is done.
By the means of the bacula-director configuration I can call a script during the processing of the last backup job (i.e. the backup of the file catalog). I tried to use this script:
#!/bin/bash
# shutdown server in 10 minutes
#
# ps, 17.11.2013
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
exit 0
The script shuts down the server - but apparently it returns just during the shutdown,
and as a consequence that last backup job hangs just until the shutdown. How can I make the script to file the shutdown and return immediately?
Update: After an extensive search I came up with a (albeit pretty ugly) solution:
The script run by bacula looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
at -f /root/scripts/shutdown_now.sh now + 10 minutes
And the second script (shutdown_now.sh) looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
shutdown -h now
Actually I found no obvious method to add the required parameters of shutdown in the syntax of the 'at' command. Maybe someone can give me some advice here.
Depending on your backup server’s OS, the implementation of shutdown might behave differently. I have tested the following two solutions on Ubuntu 12.04 and they both worked for me:
As the root user I have created a shell script with the following content and called it in a bash shell:
shutdown -h 10 &
exit 0
The exit code of the script in the shell was correct (tested with echo $?). The shutdown was still in progress (tested with shutdown -c).
This bash function call in a second shell script worked equally well:
my_shutdown() {
shutdown -h 10
}
my_shutdown &
exit 0
No need to create a second BASH script to run the shutdown command. Just replace the following line in your backup script:
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
with this:
echo "/sbin/poweroff" | /usr/bin/at now + 10 min >/dev/null 2>&1
Feel free to adjust the time interval to suit your preference.
If you can become root: either log in as, or sudo -i this works (tested on ubuntu 14.04):
# shutdown -h 20:00 & //halts the machine at 8pm
No shell script needed. I can then log out, and log back in, and the process is still there. Interestingly, if I tried this with sudo in the command line, then when I log out, the process does go away!
BTW, just to note, that I also use this command to do occasional reboots after everyone has gone home.
# shutdown -r 20:00 & //re-boots the machine at 8pm

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