youtube-dl in a crontab displays "[Errno 13] Permission denied"

Question

I am on Debian. I try to make a cron job for youtube-dl. It consists of a daily script, starting at midnight. When I execute the script manually, everything is working perfectly. However, when I use the cron job, I have got an error like this :

ERROR: unable to open for writing: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/media/Video/...

The cron is the following :

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
@daily /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl-script.sh >> /var/mail/nextcloud 2>&1

I understand, there is a permission issue somewhere, but I don't know how to solve it.

For your information :

• owner/group of the target folder (/media/Video/) is : www-data (owner), wwww-data (group)
• owner/group of the script is : nextcloud (owner), root (group)
• nextcloud and root belong to the group www-data
• and the target folder (/media/Video/) permission is 770 (owner/group group can read/write/execute, others can't do anything).

Please, could you help me ? I have seen a similar topic but the solution was not successful as the problem was not exactly the same. Thank you very much.

EDIT (old status) : so far, I have tried to copy my script (youtube-dl-script.sh) in /etc/crontab.daily folder, by respecting the rules (removing the .sh extension and script owned by root / group root). And checking with cat /etc/crontab gives me this output :

# m h dom mon dow user  command
17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6    * * 7   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6    1 * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
#

So, normally, it should have worked at 6:25 AM this morning, but it didn't !

I have discovered that other scripts have -xas a final bit, therefore, I have made chmod +x youtube-dl-script.

• Before that, the script is -rwxr-x--- 1 root root 1682 juin 16 02:24 /etc/cron.daily/youtube-dl-script.

• Now, it is -rwxr-x--x 1 root root 1682 juin 16 02:24 /etc/cron.daily/youtube-dl-script.

I have now to wait until tomorrow 6:25 AM to see if this works.

EDIT 2 (current status) : so it doesn't work. I have even made chmod 755 in order to have the same persmissions as all other scripts, and I have reboot the server, but it does not work.

What is very strange is that if I do run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily, my script is listed so it should be runned by cron.daily

Please, if you have any idea, feel free to inform me. Thank you.

Answer 1

OK, I have found the solution :

First, I have moved the script to /etc/cron.hourly, because there were no anacron installed, and because I would like to use it every hour. But it didn't worked.

Then I have run sudo service cron statusjust to check if cron service was active. It was, but I have also found an interresting warning, something like your token was expired, renew your token. So I have searched for this error message on Internet and have found that my root password needed to be renewed, otherwise cron would not work correctly. To check this, I had to use sudo chage -l root which showed that my root password was expired.

Therefore, I have renewed my root password with sudo passwd root and I have checked again with sudo chage -l root which showed that the password is now OK. Now, everything is running fine, and cron is working as expected !