Cron start script twice

Question

I have a backup script which sends my snapshots to a off-site location.

0 0 * * * /root/backup/backup_incremental >> /root/backup/test.log

For some reason my PID file which should stop the script form executing a second time doesn't work with cron. If I open two shells and start my script twice everything works as expected.

#!/usr/local/bin/zsh

PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin 
DATE=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S"` 

SCRIPTNAME=`basename $0`
PIDFILE=/var/run/${SCRIPTNAME}.pid


if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then
       #verify if the process is actually still running under this pid
         OLDPID=`cat ${PIDFILE}`
         RESULT=`ps -ef | grep ${OLDPID} | grep ${SCRIPTNAME}`  

         if [ -n "${RESULT}" ]; then
             echo "${DATE}: Script already running (PID: ${OLDPID})! Exiting"
             exit 255
         fi

fi

#grab pid of this process and update the pid file with it
PID=`ps -ef | grep ${SCRIPTNAME} | head -n1 | awk ' {print $2;} '`
echo ${PID} > ${PIDFILE}

#send it
....


if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then
    rm ${PIDFILE}
fi

This is my script striped down to the important bits.

So my question is how can cron start this more than once?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

PID=`ps -ef | grep ${SCRIPTNAME} | head -n1 | awk ' {print $2;} '`

This could either return the PID of your script, or of the grep process, or of some unrelated process that happens to have a similar enough name. This is likely to be the cause of your problem: sometimes your script writes its own PID to the pidfile and sometimes it writes something else.

The PID of your script is in the variable $$.

For those cases when you actually need to find the PID of a process given its name, see Finding the ID of a process and killing it and grep - why do brackets in grep pattern remove the grep process from ps results?

Cron start script twice

1 Answers1