pidof — 2 Technical Articles

May 23, 2024 · Operations

Why a Crontab Script Miscounts Processes: PATH and pidof Gotchas

A Linux crontab job that should run a monitoring script only when a process is absent repeatedly launches the process because the cron environment lacks the proper PATH, causing pidof to fail silently and always return zero.

crontabpidofshell-script

0 likes · 6 min read

Why a Crontab Script Miscounts Processes: PATH and pidof Gotchas

MaGe Linux Operations

May 15, 2024 · Operations

Why Does My Cron Job Always Restart My Process? The Hidden PATH Pitfall

An investigation reveals that a cron‑scheduled script repeatedly launches a process because the limited PATH in cron’s environment prevents the pidof command from running, causing the script to misinterpret the process count as zero, and the fix is to set the correct PATH.

Troubleshootingcronpath

0 likes · 6 min read

Why Does My Cron Job Always Restart My Process? The Hidden PATH Pitfall