Issues with Email attachments for Crontab Jobs

Hello ALL,

Last days I faced a strange issue with a shell script running as crontab job.

I had a Shell Script with working properly when executing manually, it functions simply sent an email with embedded attachments.  However, when it scheduled in Crontab, it does not send attachments ( I received the email but with BLANK attachments – even if code running fine and sending attachments when executed manually).

It made my brain burn for some time, then I found a lot of people facing the same issue when scripts in crontab.

It looks for some crontab relation with SH/Bash scripts.

Here are the workarounds I found and deployed in my script. Now, the email attachments are being included in emails when running as crontab jobs.

• Include: ‘#!/bin/sh’ or ‘#!/bin/bash’ in the first line of your shell script.
• Insert full path of commands you using in statements. E.g: Are you using ‘mailx’? so, execute ‘whereis mailx’, then, all statements where mailx is running will be like ‘/usb/bin/mailx -s “SUBJECT” myemail@domain.com’.
• Source your sh/bash profile before the email statement. This statement solved my error. I found some posts explanations, but not sure why
  • ‘. ~/.bash_profile’.

Here is my code:

#!/bin/sh
################################################################################
# Email alerting to
################################################################################
EMAILTO="youremail@company.com"      # The email to send the alert to
SUBJECT="My shell script in crontab" # email subject

. ~/.bash_profile

sqlplus /nolog < /dev/null 2>&1
connect / as sysdba
spool /tmp/temp_out.txt
select * from dual
spool off
EOF

cat /tmp/temp_out.txt |grep "no rows selected"
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
echo "Nothing to do"
/usr/bin/echo "Nothing to do"| /usr/bin/mail -s "${SUBJECT}" ${EMAILTO}
else
/usr/bin/cat /tmp/temp_out.txt | /usr/bin/mail -s "${SUBJECT}" ${EMAILTO}
fi
rm /tmp/temp_out.txt