Bash script fails *only* from cron with “not a valid identifier”
Matthew Barrera 
I have a script that creates a new log file each week that can be called from other scripts with a log file parameter. Without any arguments it creates a log with the name of the parent process in ~/bin/log. This works fine in a terminal, but in a cron job it fails complaining that the function default-log is “not a valid identifier”.
The function seems trivial and everything it does works fine outside the function. I can easily work around this as the function is only called twice and I can just substitute the whole 2 lines, but I’d still like to understand what’s going on.
Other details:
- Not a root cron job
- The cron job is actually a script that calls this (
weekly-log "$LOG") but all the echoed paths, etc. in my debugging look fine - Tested using “Run selected task” in gnome-schedule. This seems to produce the same environment, but you get to see the output.
- Ubuntu 16.04
#!/bin/bash
#
# Start fresh logfile each Monday using the supplied path/name
# or create in ~/bin/logs with the name of the calling script
LOG=""
PARENT="$(ps -o comm= $PPID)"
DATEFORMAT="+%a %e %b %Y %I:%M:%S %P %Z"
# Thu 26 Jan 2017 01:52:49 pm AEDT
# Debugging—these all look OK
echo "Args: $*"
echo "PPID: $PPID"
echo "PARENT: $PARENT"
echo "HOME: $HOME"
echo "Default LOG: $HOME/bin/log/$(basename "$PARENT").log"
mkdir -p "$HOME/bin/log"
function default-log { mkdir -p "$HOME/bin/log" LOG="$HOME/bin/log/$(basename "$PARENT").log"
}
if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then echo "No args" default-log
# mkdir -p "$HOME/bin/log"
# LOG="$HOME/bin/log/$(basename "$PARENT").log"
else DIR=$(dirname "$1") # dirname returns "." for invalid path! if [ ! "$DIR" = "." ] && [ -d "$DIR" ] ; then LOG="$1" else echo "Invalid path" default-log
# mkdir -p "$HOME/bin/log"
# LOG="$HOME/bin/log/$(basename "$PARENT").log" echo "Invalid path to log file: $1" 2>&1 | tee "$LOG" fi
fi
# Create new log or append
if [[ $(date +%u) -eq 1 ]] ; then echo "--------------------------------" 2>&1 | tee "$LOG"
else echo 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG" echo "--------------------------------" 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG"
fi
echo $(date "$DATEFORMAT") 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG"
echo "" 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG"1 Answer
According to POSIX, function names can contain only word characters ([a-zA-Z0-9_]) (source: part 1, part 2). Change the function name from default-log to default_log.
But, Bash is normally very lenient about function names, so I'm not sure why it's failing.
0
