Re: grep: -i option not working i cronjobs

[J. W.Andersen, Falster System Teknik]

Julian Foad wrote:

> J. W.Andersen, Falster System Teknik wrote:
>
> > Scenario: grep 2.51, distro: SuSE 9.1
> >
> > When grep is running in a cron job, the "-i" option does not work.
> > I get matches reported only when PATTERN and file content is
> > exaclty identical. When run from console, everything works fine.
> > Same result under different shells - sh, bash and csh have been tested.
>
>
> Please send Grep bug reports to <address@hidden>.  Presently that is 
> an alias for <address@hidden> but soon it is likely to be a 
> separate list.
>
> Please give enough details so that we can reproduce the problem.  Give 
> the exact grep command being executed, and an example of the contents 
> of a file to be searched, in which grep fails to find the correct 
> matches.
>
> - Julian


Sure - and thanks for coming back to me BTW.

What am I trying to do ?

On the Linux server, I have  a repository for McAfee's antivirus  system 
for some Windows clients.
Untill now, the daily/hourly update of this repository had to be done on 
a special Windows machine,
and I am converting this update procedure to run as a cronjob on the 
Linux server.
McAfee - or at least their local subsidiary -  frequently offers 
intermediate updates between the
regular weekly updates to cover some recent virus treats, these 
intermediate updates are
shipped as a file named extra.dat. Alas, as the repository is meant for 
Windows systems, that
don't care about the use of upper/lowercase in filenames, McAfee is 
rather inconsequent in
their filenaming - this week the file is named extra.dat, the week 
before as EXTRA.DAT,
and maybe they name it Extra.Dat - or heaven knows what - next week.

With LFTP I retrieve a directory listing from the McAfee server, this is 
the file exdat (attached).
You will see the filename, I am looking for, extra.dat, at the end of 
that file.

In the following script, I attempt to find, if case-independent string 
extra.dat occurs in the file

#! /bin/bash
#
/bin/grep -o -i EXTRA.DAT /tmp/exdat > /tmp/exdatfn        # Locate 
extra.dat in dir-list
#

This script works as charm when I run it from the console, but fails 
when started from cron.
Again, if I have an absolute match between the PATTERN in the 
commandline and tthe file
content, it works, but the case-independancy fails in the cronjob.

I wondered if maybe access to some library is missing when running under 
cron ? BTW, the
file to be processed *IS* of course globally readable. As earlier 
mentioned, I have tried
different shells - bash, sh, csh - all with the same result.

Thanks, Joe.

-rw-r--r--    1 0        100          1149 Nov 05 15:49 extra-x4404a.zip
-rw-r--r--    1 0        100          2347 Nov 05 15:49 extra.dat