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RE: Taper

>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Tickle <s.tickle [at] quarndon.co.uk> writes:

    Steve> At 13:03 17/04/2000 +0100, Paul Sims wrote:
    >> Steve - from the Taper FAQ at http://www.e-survey.net.au/taper/
    >> : For some reason, when cron runs a job, it doesn't put /sbin
    >> on the path, and therefore, taper can't find its children which
    >> are in /sbin. The solution is to move taper, bg_backup and
    >> bg_restore to /bin or put links in /bin to point to the entries
    >> in /sbin. Newer versions of taper will automatically do this
    >> with make install.

    Steve> Got it!!  You're a star Paul, I put links in /bin to point
    Steve> to the files in /sbin as you said and it's cracked it!

It's not a good idea to do this in general.

Set PATH explicitly in the script: PATH=/sbin:$PATH.

Since taper has decided it's really a user utility and not a system
admin utility, it's OK to move things around in this case.

    Steve> Weird that cron doesn't have /sbin in its' path.

Cron doesn't have /sbin in its path because /sbin (and friends) are
for administrative utilities and daemon binaries, things that change
the normal behavior of the system (ie, kernel).  It's probably not a
good idea to do such things without human intervention, so cron
doesn't have /sbin or /usr/sbin on the path as a reminder to the
crontab writer that they're doing something unusual.  (This isn't
security, unlike the fact that PATH is not taken from the
environment.)

Backups are a userland kind of activity, so taper really does belong
in a /bin directory.  See the File Hierarchy Standard
(/usr/doc/debian-policy/fhs on Debian systems).


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