Re: Running IDL from cron

[thompson(at)orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)]

Gwyn Fireman <Gwyn.Fireman@gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

>Hi, everyone -

>With Deja gone and Google barely functional I have to ask here what I'm 
>sure has been addressed before:

>How do you run IDL routines from cron - while maintaining IDL_PATH and 
>other environment variables?

>I have had no trouble running my idl routines using batch or at, when 
>starting in the same directory as the main-level routine.  In that case 
>my environment is copied to the spawned process.

>Now I have the need to run these from cron.  I have been able to write 
>scripts to cd to the appropriate directory and to run my .cshrc (where 
>my IDL_PATH and other environment variables are defined), but keep 
>running into problems.  The latest is than .cshrc bombs on a 
>system-level env that apparently isn't defined when running from cron.

>So can anyone point me in the right direction?
>I'm running { alpha OSF unix 5.3 Nov 11 1999}.

>Many thanks in advance,
>   Gwyn Fireman


Gwyn:

I suspect that your trouble is that you have environment variables which are
being defined in your .login file rather than in .cshrc.  That's pretty common
practice, but one which I personally avoid.  If you include the statement
"source ~/.login", that should get around the problem.

Bill Thompson