shell script wget not working when used as a cron job

Question

i have a function in a php web app that needs to get periodically called by a cron job. originally i just did a simple wget to the url to call the function and everything worked fine, but ever since we added user auth i am having trouble getting it to work.

if i manually execute these commands i can login, get the cookie and then access the correct url:

site=http://some.site/login/in/here
cookie=`wget --post-data 'username=testuser&password=testpassword' $site -q -S -O /dev/null 2>&1 | awk '/Set-Cookie/{print $2}' | awk 'NR==2{print}'`
wget -O /dev/null --header="Cookie: $cookie" http://some.site/call/this/function

but when executed as a script, either manually or through cron, it doesn't work.

i am new to shell scripting, any help would be appreciated

this is being run on ubuntu server 10.04

Answer 1

In theory, the only difference from manually executing these and using a script would be the timing.

Try inserting a sleep 5 or so before the last command. Maybe the http server does some internal communication and that takes a while. Hard to say, because you didn't post the error you get.

Answer 2

OK simple things first -

1. I assume the file begins with #!/bin/bash or something
2. You have chmod ded the file +x
3. You're using unix 0x0d line endings

And you're not expecting to return any of the variables to the calling shell, I presume?

Failing this try tee ing the output of each command to a log file.