Cron issues

I'm trying to write a cron job that will run my breakfast routine for me while I'm on vacation, but it doesn't work.

Here's how I call the program:
java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Duser.home=/home/eliot/games/kol -Duser.dir=/home/eliot/games/kol -jar /home/eliot/games/kol/KoLmafia.jar script=/home/eliot/games/kol/scripts/fadookie_breakfast.cli --CLI &

When I redirect stderr to a file, it says this:

KoLmafia v12.4
Running on Linux
Using Java 1.5.0_10

password:
Validating login server...
Sending login request...
Encountered error in login.
>

Click to expand...

The bizzare part is that the program runs fine when I type the same thing into the shell, just not when I'm trying to make cron do the exact same thing. I wasn't even getting any output at all until I added the headless argument.

Any advice? I'll probably be gone before I can get it working, oh well. :-\

Sounds like cron is running as a user that doesn't have permissions to the /kol/settings folder?

You'd think, but ps shows that cron is running the job under my account.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe it's not finding the settings folder since it's in ~/.kolmafia instead of ~/games/kol/settings ? I'll try making a symlink just in case.

Argh... now I realize I get the login error when I try to run java headless normally in the shell. But I have to use that in order for java to run under cron at all.

Ah, looks like KoLmafia didn't run in headless mode after all. This should be fixed and the fix will be available in the next release.

I use cron for my breakfast routines as well, but never had to use any sort of headless option. I've got the command I use to start KoLmafia in a shell script in /home/me/bin, which simply executes:


aphroguy.txt logs me into the CLI automatically, then calls my breakfast.ash script to be run. Been working fairly solid for me for quite some time; and as I said, never used the headless mode.

That must be my problem then, I should have set -Duser.dir to ~/.kolmafia instead of the path to the KoLmafia.jar file. I'll try that out in a bit, it will probably work.

I am a complete Linux N00b
Any chance for a Step by Step guide to auto-starting Mafia using cron?