Re: Cron running 'Hello world' script dies with "Could not startup."

On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:07:29 +0200, Ivo F.A.C. Fokkema wrote: > On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:01:41 -0500, Ray Hauge wrote: > >> On Tuesday 08 August 2006 09:01, Ivo F.A.C. Fokkema wrote: >>> On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 09:01:42 -0500, Ray Hauge wrote: >>> > On Tuesday 08 August 2006 08:47, Ivo F.A.C. Fokkema wrote: >>> >> > Does the user running the cron have permission to execute the php >>> >> > binary? >>> >> >>> >> Yes, the file's owner is me and it's my crontab. Also, I've >>> >> made the >>> >> file readable to all, just in case. All directories up the directory >>> >> tree are readable/executable, as well. >>> > >>> > I think he's asking if the php program is executable to you, the user. >>> > It is possible that it would only have execute for owner and group, not >>> > other. >>> >>> Sorry, yes, The PHP binary is executable by all. Actually, I'm very sure >>> the error message "Could not startup." is generated by PHP-cli. When >>> googling on that exact message, I found it in the PHP-cli source code >>> (including the period at the end). However, I cannot determine from the >>> PHP-cli source code what's up. >> >> It looks like when you run the script, then it works just fine, but it blows >> up when you run it through cron. >> >> Two things I would check: >> >> 1) Cron can read your *.php files. >> >> 2) Cron can run php >> >> to test #2, have cron do a php -i and see what happens. > > 1) was OK, but 2) didn't return anything, not even an error... this has > started me thinking, and when using -ni it works...! -n makes PHP-cli > ignore the .ini file. When looking at my .ini file, the modification date > is July 31st, the day it all stopped working. I need to leave now, but > will investigate tomorrow to see what's up with my .ini files, on both > machines, and check if my scripts run with -n or after tweaking of the > .ini. > > Thanks! OK guys... guess what? It was the php.ini file from PHP-cli. I had been messing around with PHP-GTK and had edited PHP-cli's php.ini to load the gtk.so library (on both machines). Apparently, this stops PHP-cli to function completely from cron. Even the 'Hello world' script didn't run. The suggestion to try php -i got me thinking. Since that didn't return anything, I thought about trying php -h (worked) and php -ni (ignore .ini file). Suddenly, it worked... SO: Loading the GTK library in your /etc/php4/cli/php.ini, KILLS the PHP-cli functionality from cron. On Ubuntu Dapper, that is. Not sure about other distros. Thanks guys, for all of your suggestions!