Crontab is not auto-restarting service

I am trying to auto restart smokeping every five minutes using crontab (for a specific test), but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working.

> sudo crontab -e ...
#Restart smokeping every five minutes
*/5 * * * * service smokeping restart

What am I doing wrong? There is no information on syslog.

1 Answer

The reason it is not working is that cron's default PATH is hardcoded and it looks like that:

#ifndef _PATH_DEFPATH
# define _PATH_DEFPATH "/usr/bin:/bin"
#endif

More specifically, the service command cannot be found. If you try executing which service you will get something like:/usr/sbin/serviceThis is why it may be helpful to explicitly set the PATH variable in your crontab.

A full crontab example follows:

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h dom mon dow command
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
*/5 * * * * service smokeping restart