Running pg_dump under vcron

Hi there,

I'm having a bit of trouble running a particular script with vcron. The script does a pg_dump of a postresql database, compresses the sql file and copies it to a remote server. I can run the script manually, as in

./scriptname.sh

But if I set the script to be run by vcron, as in

crontab -u root -e

0 16 * * * /path/to/scriptname.sh

Nothing happens.

I have inserted code into the script that rings the hardware bell. When I run the script with vcron, the hardware bell beeps. There's still no pg_dump of my database, however. The pg_dump directive is written as follows:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/pg_dump -a -f /home/httpd/htdocs/db_name.sql db_name

Someone told me that the problem has to do with vcron not reading any rc. files to initialize its environment. So I tried sourcing my environment initiation files in the script as follows:

. /etc/profile
. ${HOME}/.profile

This caused the script to stop functioning altogether.

I should note that pg_dump runs for the particular database I want to backup under my user name. If I try to manually run the script as root, I get

pg_dump: [archiver (db)] connection to database "db_name" failed: FATAL: user "root" does not exist

Since cron is run as root, I modified the pg_dump as follows:

/usr/bin/pg_dump -S user -a -f /home/httpd/htdocs/db_name.sql db_name

This didn't help either.

If anybody has any suggestions, please tell me.

Mark