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I have checked this question regarding crontab failures.

I am running this command to capture the htop command and create a snapshot of it in html format (htop output to human readable file):

/bin/echo q | /usr/bin/htop | /usr/bin/aha --black --line-fix > /tmp/htop.html

This command works correctly on terminal and it doesn't depend on any environment variables. When I add this command as a cronjob, it just generates an empty html file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<!-- This file was created with the aha Ansi HTML Adapter. http://ziz.delphigl.com/tool_aha.php -->
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xml+xhtml; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>stdin</title>
</head>
<body style="color:white; background-color:black">
<pre>
</pre>
</body>
</html>

Any reason why it is not able to capture the output via cron?

dessert
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Chillar Anand
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1 Answers1

2

htop needs the TERM variable set to e.g. xterm to output any data, so just set this variable for xterm in your cron line, e.g.:

@hourly echo q|TERM=xterm htop|aha --black --line-fix >/tmp/htop.html

If you want to test whether a command really doesn’t depend on any environment variables – which often lead to problems with cron, see the question you linked –, use env -i to “start with an empty environment”:

$ env -i htop
Error opening terminal: unknown.

Combined with the diff of cron’s and your terminal’s environment that’s a nice way to test which variables a command needs. htop in fact only needs TERM:

env -i TERM=xterm htop
dessert
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