run .profile function as cron job

Question

In the .profile file of the root user I have defined a function, e.g.

function printDate() {
  date
}

I want to run this function every minute and append the output to cron.log. I tried adding the following crontab entry:

* * * * * printDate > $HOME/cron.log 2>&1

But it doesn't work. The cron.log file gets created, but it's empty. I guess this is because the .profile isn't read by cron, so any functions/aliases defined therein are unavailable to it. So I tried changing the crontab entry to:

* * * * * source $HOME/.profile;printDate >> $HOME/cron.log 2>&1

But this doesn't work either. It seems cron still doesn't have access to the printDate function because I see the following in cron.log

/bin/sh: printDate: not found

Answer 1

Just wrap it in another bash script. Your file names will be different, but I have: test(.profile)

#!/bin/bash
function printDate() {
  date
}

wrap(a new script you can put wherever, just change the url)

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/
source ./test
printDate > ./date.log

when run from a /bin/sh

$ ls
test  wrap
$ ./wrap
$ cat date.log
Wed Apr 11 11:49:39 EDT 2012
$ 

Now just make sure your paths/environment are right

The crontab lines I just tested were:

SHELL=/bin/sh
HOME=/root
* * * * * $HOME/wrap >/dev/null 2>&1