Crontab isn't running my python script in macOs although the script works when run manually-CodePudding

My school always wants us to download pptx and docx for lecture and practicals and I hate that I'll need to always manually delete it after reading finish. Therefore I'd created a script that trashes whatever's in the folder and would like crontab to schedule it to run every hour.

Everything works fine when I manually run this code through the terminal.

def remove_trash():
    import os
    dir_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
    filename = os.path.join(dir_path, "trash_script.py")
    with open(filename, "r") as f:
        _ = f.read()
    os.system(f"rm -df {dir_path}/* && touch {filename}")
    with open(filename, "w") as f:
        f.write(_)
        
if __name__ == "__main__":
    remove_trash()

But when I had added this in my crontab,

0 * * * * python ~/Desktop/Projects/script/Trash/trash_script.py

I tried giving the file permission to execute but it still wouldn't run at every minute 0.

chmod  x trash_script.py

CodePudding user response：

I'll suggest to move your script into a bash script first, and add some logs to find the issue. The bash script will look like this:

trash.sh

cd ~/Desktop/Projects/script/Trash
python trash_script.py

Change the execution permissions of your script

chmod  x trash.sh

Modify your cron job to look like this:

0 * * * * sh <path_to_bash_script>/trash.sh >> ~/Desktop/Projects/script/Trash/trash.log 2>&1

This will help to have some output every time the script runs.