Rsync ssh script execution fails under cron?

[Jeff Hill]

I've spent more than a day trying to write a script to backup my remote server to a local machine using ssh. The script works perfectly when I execute it directly (and I've gotten a number of variations to work okay), but I can't get cron to successfully execute it. There is no result output, so it seems cron is hanging on something, but I don't know what. 

I'm running it as root, so it doesn't seem like it would be a file permissions issue. The only time I've been able to get the script to execute was when I used a dummy remote server name (of course it reported that it failed, but cron did at least ran it).

I'm no expert, but I've written a few scripts for cron before without any problem. I appreciate that this could be considered an issue with cron and not rsync, but I thought users of rsync would probably have experience writing such cron scripts.

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#!/bin/sh
# \
exec expect "$0" ${1+"$@"}
#
# -n dry run // --progress -v  for testing
# -z for file compression
log_user 0 
spawn time /usr/bin/rsync -anrultvPz --delete --exclude="vu/" -e /usr/bin/ssh  --timeout 30 root at apache:/home/jhill/ /usr/local/bkup/home/jhill
expect "password: " 
send "secret\n" 
log_user 1 
interact 
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Thanks for any suggestions,

Jeff Hill


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Jeff Hill