Request for review of a bug report on debian (#985260 cron jobs error not mailed to user)
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Hey folks, can someone please who knows good about cron have a look at this bug report. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=985260 The users expect that he would got a mail if there is a syntax error in one of his user-callback scripts running by cron. I'm not sure if this should be the default behaviour and which component is responsible for sending mails. For the letter I assume cron should do this. So I assume this bug is not related to Back In Time. Am I wrong? Kind Christian
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Hi, from my incomplete knowledge, I'd say that cron sends an email when a process it calls terminates with an exit code =! 0, or prints any output to stdour or stderr. So this sounds like the backintime process called from cron does not terminate =! 0 and does not print anything when its user-callback script fails. I can see that this is irritating, and contrary to expectations. We've had a related complaint before: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1053 We'd probably need to examine if/how the exit code of the user-callback script gets handed back to the backintime process (and then to cron), or why this does not happen. Cheers, Michael On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 11:17:28AM +0000, c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote:
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I think I have summarized the problems related to user-callback script error handling in this issue: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/827 I also described the (huge) work to do to improve this. @c.buhtz Perhaps you can add above link to the debian bug report as "known issue" I cannot see any simple workaround for this. A possible workaround would be to add try/catch functionality to the user-callback script and send emails in the catch part (hoping this does not cause another error ;-) https://www.xmodulo.com/catch-handle-errors-bash.html On Fri, 2023-01-20 at 12:25 +0100, Michael Büker wrote:
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Hi, from my incomplete knowledge, I'd say that cron sends an email when a process it calls terminates with an exit code =! 0, or prints any output to stdour or stderr. So this sounds like the backintime process called from cron does not terminate =! 0 and does not print anything when its user-callback script fails. I can see that this is irritating, and contrary to expectations. We've had a related complaint before: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1053 We'd probably need to examine if/how the exit code of the user-callback script gets handed back to the backintime process (and then to cron), or why this does not happen. Cheers, Michael On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 11:17:28AM +0000, c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote:
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I think I have summarized the problems related to user-callback script error handling in this issue: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/827 I also described the (huge) work to do to improve this. @c.buhtz Perhaps you can add above link to the debian bug report as "known issue" I cannot see any simple workaround for this. A possible workaround would be to add try/catch functionality to the user-callback script and send emails in the catch part (hoping this does not cause another error ;-) https://www.xmodulo.com/catch-handle-errors-bash.html On Fri, 2023-01-20 at 12:25 +0100, Michael Büker wrote:
participants (3)
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BiT dev
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c.buhtz@posteo.jp
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Michael Büker