Where can I set environment variables that crontab will use?

linux unix environment-variables crontab
James picture James · Feb 9, 2010 · Viewed 294.7k times · Source

I have a crontab running every hour. The user running it has environment variabless in the .bash_profile that work when the user runs the job from the terminal, however, obviously these don't get picked up by crontab when it runs.

I've tried setting them in .profile and .bashrc but they still don't seem to get picked up. Does anyone know where I can put environment vars that crontab can pick up?

Answer

carestad picture carestad · May 18, 2012

You can define environment variables in the crontab itself when running crontab -e from the command line.

LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_ALL=nb_NO.UTF-8
# m h  dom mon dow   command

* * * * * sleep 5s && echo "yo"

This feature is only available to certain implementations of cron. Ubuntu and Debian currently use vixie-cron which allows these to be declared in the crontab file (also GNU mcron).

Archlinux and RedHat use cronie which does not allow environment variables to be declared and will throw syntax errors in the cron.log. Workaround can be done per-entry:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
* * * * * export LC_ALL=nb_NO.UTF-8; sleep 5s && echo "yo"

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