I have a problem with cron tasks. Previously this script worked fine on Mac OS X 10.6 server, but when I initialize it on Lion (client), this script stopped working. Basically, this .bat file calls a jar file (that invokes a loop of mysqldump commands) to backup several databases on several servers, and runs perfectly if launched by the shell. cd /Users/nameoftheuser/Desktop/backupper /usr/bin/java -cp .:Backupper.jar:lib/mail.jar backupper.Main "/Users/nameoftheuser/Desktop/backupper/listasiti.txt" "/Users/nameofthe/Desktop/backupper/config.properties But if the cron launches the same .bat file, the generated database backups are 0 bytes. The cron entry is: 0 0 sh /Users/path/to/file.bat I believe that the problem is that cron doesn't run as root. Or what else?