Mysqldump fails as a cron job

Here's a curiosity ... running a mysqldump as a crontab job, nothing happens on one of our servers. Now I HAVE included the full path to the executable file in my crontab line, and I have redirected the output to a full path ... so something else is tripping it up.

What do I do? An Internet search and I discover that I'm not the first to have the problem (I didn't expect that I was) and that although no definite solution has been found on the places that I'm visiting (someone ditched MySQL and went to PostGRESql instead!!). it's suspected as being something to do with the rudimentary shell environment that cron provides.

I'm on a time-scale today, so rather that spend a long time finding out what was happening, I decided to spend a shorter time achieving what I needed in another way (a.k.a. a work around!). By writing a short script that includes the MySQLdump, I can get the MySQLdump to run under a full bash shell. And I can easily call up that script from cron.

Problem not explained / solved exactly ... but I have achieved what I need.
(written 2009-06-30, updated 2009-07-01)

Associated topics are indexed under

S156 - Interfacing Applications to MySQL Databases
  [3455] MySQL, MySQLi, PDO or something else - how best to talk to databases from PHP - (2011-09-24)
  [3447] Needle in a haystack - finding the web server overload - (2011-09-18)
  [3099] Perl - database access - DBD, DBI and DBIx modules - (2010-12-22)
  [3035] How to display information from a database within a web page - (2010-11-07)
  [2790] Joining a MySQL table from within a Python program - (2010-06-02)
  [2745] Connecting Python to sqlite and MySQL databases - (2010-04-28)
  [2381] Checking the database connection manually - (2009-08-28)
  [1885] Hiding a MySQL database behind a web page - (2008-11-15)
  [1561] Uploading to a MySQL database through PHP - examples and common questions - (2008-03-02)
  [1518] Downloading data for use in Excel (from PHP / MySQL) - (2008-01-25)
  [1450] Easy selection of multiple SQL conditions from PHP - (2007-11-30)
  [1381] Using a MySQL database to control mod_rewrite via PHP - (2007-10-06)
  [723] Viewing images held in a MySQL database via PHP - (2006-05-17)
  [663] Python to MySQL - (2006-03-31)
  [644] Using a MySQL database from Perl - (2006-03-13)
  [104] mysql_connect or mysql_pconnect in PHP? - (2004-10-30)

S161 - Data Access and Security in MySQL
  [3270] SQL - Data v Metadata, and the various stages of data selection - (2011-04-29)
  [2647] Removing duplicates from a MySQL table - (2010-02-22)
  [2204] Images in a database? How big is a database? (MySQL) - (2009-05-28)
  [1131] MySQL - Password security (authentication protocol) - (2007-04-02)
  [947] What is an SQL injection attack? - (2006-11-27)
  [647] Checking for MySQL errors - (2006-03-15)
  [535] MySQL permissions and privileges - (2005-12-20)
  [401] What is an SQL injection attack? - (2005-08-02)
  [193] The wrong MySQL - (2005-01-29)
  [192] Current MySQL and PHP paths and upgrades - (2005-01-28)

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Some other Articles

winmail.dat enclosure ... reading on an Apple
Travelling
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Mysqldump fails as a cron job - a work around
History is not always pretty
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Important - the future of Melksham / Chamber of Commerce
Grouping rows for a summary report - MySQL and PHP
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