"killed" message from cron.daily, but not when run from command line

Posted by Dan Stahlke on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Dan Stahlke
Published on 2012-09-15T14:31:38Z Indexed on 2012/09/15 15:40 UTC
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On Fedora 17, I put a file into /etc/cron.daily with the following contents:

cd /
su dstahlke /home/dstahlke/bin/anacron-daily.sh
exit 0

For some reason, I get a mail every day that just says

/etc/cron.daily/dstahlke-daily:

 ...killed.

I tried with and without the exit 0 line above (I noticed that some system scripts have that and others don't, I'm not sure of the purpose). Running /etc/cron.daily/dstahlke-daily from the command line as root produces no ...killed message. Other than the message, everything seems to work fine. Putting set -x in the above script, as well as in the /home/dstahlke/bin/anacron-daily.sh script shows that the ...killed message happens just after the latter script terminates (or perhaps just after the su command finishes).

What causes the ...killed message?

Or, is there a more acceptable way to have anacron run a user script daily? I figured that putting this in /etc/cron.daily would help the system coordinate all of the daily tasks rather than potentially running my task concurrently with the system tasks.

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