Shell script to create Flash Archives (flar) on Solaris spawns hundreds of processes

a) which user is this running under (in which user's crontab did you put the command)?
b) Do you redirect the command's output to some file (logfile)?
    If not, did you check the user's email if you got some message?
c) If email doesn't work reliably, redirect your script's output into a file. Something like
        /my/script.sh > /var/log/flarcreate.log 2>&1
    should do.
d) Make sure the command "flar" can be found by using /usr/sbin/flar instead of flar
    alone.

How often does the cron job run? Are the hundreds of flar processes coming from different invocations via cron,
or are they all coming from a single run? Try using the ptree command to find out how the processes were
created. Try to use truss and pstack to find out what they are doing or waiting for.

Thanks for your responses

The job is set to run under root's cron and /usr/sbin/ is in the PATH for all users, but maybe it would be neater to have it specified using the abosolute path in the script...

I'll try the troubelshooting suggestions that you mentioned and let you know my findings

Many thanks

Marcus

Starting a script from cron does NOT source the standard login files like /etc/profile ...
Therefore, make sure you use absolut path names for anything else but /usr/bin

There are only two command in his example, rm and flar. If flar wasn't found, then there would not be any
extra processes hanging around.  It would be a bad thing if the flar script itself needed to have the path
set a certina way though.

blu,
I think the more importatn part is capturing the command's output for further analysis

If you check your mail on the system, do you see error messages from the cron job?

if not redirected, all commands output will be send by mail to user.

you may set env variables needed by the commands in the script itself.

Actually, I've looked and looked at this script and I can't see anything wrong. I now think it's actually the sftp script that is causing the problem

The cron environment is as follows:

HOME=/
LOGNAME=root
PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
SHELL=/usr/bin/sh
TZ=GMT0

I can't see that there would be any problem with paths to the required binaries...

I reviewed the flar script yesterday and ran it under cron every how and it seem that all processes terminated properly

However, I set the sftp script to copy a flar image of another server at midnight and came in today to find about 60 SSH processes and 260 or so SFTP processes!

I'm wondering now whether I need to update that script so that the FTP commands are in a separate file - I saw this on the following web page

http://www.snailbook.com/faq/scripting-sftp.auto.html

But I still don't understand why that would be required!

I will updload the sftpCopy script and the log file

Any guidance welcome and if this needs to be opened as a new question, please let me know

Many thanks

Marcus

#!/bin/sh
 
# Set environment variables
 
remoteHost='server2'
timestamp=`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`
 
 
# Pull file from Remote System
 
cd /export/home/backups/remote
sftp $remoteHost <<EOF
cd /export/home/backups/local
get backup.flar
quit
EOF
 
 
# Rename archive
 
mv backup.flar $remoteHost-backup-$timestamp.flar
 
 
# Remove the old archive
 
lsNumber=`ls | wc -l`
 
if [ $lsNumber -gt 1 ]; then
       rm `ls -1t | tail -1`
   exit 1
fi

Select allOpen in new window

sftpCopy.log

I tried this with your SCP script and it worked fine. It's much easier than SFTP too, so that's great! Thank you very much for your help - It's greatly appreciated, particularly as I'm so bad at writing code! I'll get there in the end perhaps...

no problem -- just keep practicing ;-)