Bug 404154

Summary:	Cron does not invoke folder /usr/local/bin (only /usr/bin)
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Wiki Melancholie <wiki.melancholie>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Matthias Koenig <mkoenig>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Wiki Melancholie 2008-06-26 15:20:50 UTC

Pre-note: This occurs with openSUSE 10.1 (on a V-Server), but I think this probably would also happen with 10.x and 11.0! If so, this should be fixed in v11.

The original version of Python was 2.4.2, too old for me. So I installed Python 2.5.2 by using 'make'.

If I am typing "python -V" it shows me 2.5.2.
If I create a shell script containing "python -V" it also shows me 2.5.2.

But if I add that script to my cronjobs, it will output 2.4.2! Oddly, the file "/usr/bin/python2.4" is used then! Why does "python" use/link to "python2.4" instead of "python2.5" if run by cron?

Directly running "python2.5" or "/usr/local/bin/python" works though ;-)

Comment 1 Wiki Melancholie 2008-06-27 13:31:48 UTC

Oh, stating "python2.5" does not work either with cron.

The reason is that cron only uses /usr/bin/python(2.4) (but not /usr/local/bin/python(2.5))!

Shouldn't cron be allowed to use also /usr/local/bin versions?

Comment 2 Matthias Koenig 2008-07-17 15:47:15 UTC

No, the default path is intentionally restricted.
But you can set the PATH environment variable in your crontab, for example
to
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin