Crontab problem

[doulos]

I have been running a particular cronjob on a reseller account for years, but when I use the same job on a new VPS account nothing is dumped and I get this error emailed to me:

Usage: mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
OR mysqldump [OPTIONS] --databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
OR mysqldump [OPTIONS] --all-databases [OPTIONS]
For more options, use mysqldump --help

If I copy and paste the job exactly to terminal it runs fine and a backup is created.

Here is the job:

date=`date -I` ; mysqldump -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME > /home/USERNAME/sqlbackups/DATABASE_$date.sql; gzip /home/USENAME/sqlbackups/DATABASENAME_$date.sql

Any suggestions?

[quietFinn]

I believe it should be:
-u USERNAME
not:
-uUSERNAME

[doulos]

date=`date -I` ; mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME > /home/USERNAME/sqlbackups/DATABASE_$date.sql; gzip /home/USENAME/sqlbackups/DATABASENAME_$date.sql

same error, but runs fine manually

[doulos]

Even though I changed nothing... it started working. We'll see if it continues.

Thanks for your time.

[doulos]

Ok, another problem. I am trying to run a backup of my public_html folder, but exclude all files in folder A, and then put the backup in folder B. As far as I can tell this cronjob does the backup but is not excluding the files and puts the backup in the root directory - and an empty file in directory B.

Can someone who knows what's what tell me how to fix this?

date=`date -I` ; tar -zcf backup_$date.tgz ./public_html --exclude=/home/USERNAME/public_html/folder A > /home/USERNAME/folder B/backup_$date.tgz

[doulos]

I tried this but still doesn't exclude...

date=`date -I` ; tar -zcf backup_$date.tgz ./public_html --exclude= "/home/USERNAME/public_html/folder A"

Also tried this - it didn't exclude:

date=`date -I` ; tar -zcf backup_$date.tgz --exclude= "/home/USERNAME/public_html/folder A" ./public_html

[mp3]

Originally Posted by doulos

date=`date -I` ; mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME > /home/USERNAME/sqlbackups/DATABASE_$date.sql; gzip /home/USENAME/sqlbackups/DATABASENAME_$date.sql

same error, but runs fine manually

This is a pretty good indication (usually) that you are relying on an environmental variable somewhere.