[SOLR-11515] bin/post uses "-t" to check for stdin, easily breaks when run from cron (which has no terminal)

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Duplicate
• Component/s: scripts and tools
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Chris M. Hostetter
• Created: 19/Oct/17 23:37
• Updated: 08/Jun/19 15:11
• Resolved: 23/Apr/19 13:20

Description

one of our users (matt__) spent all day on freenode#solr trying to figure out why a simple script he had that called bin/post would work fine when he ran it, but didn't seem to do anything when run as a cronjob.

After helping him setup better logging from cron, it ultimiately came down to the fact that a command like this (which was the very first thing in his script)...

bin/post -c yyy -host xxx -d '<delete><query>zzz</query></delete>'

...was failing with an error like this...

Unrecognized argument: <delete><query>zzz</query></delete>
If this was intended to be a data file, it does not exist relative to /opt/blah/blah

Ultimately we determined that the problem was how bin/post tests for "stdin" – by checking to see if it's not being run in a terminal (with ' ! -t 0 ') – in which case it doesn't treat the argument after -d as data, and instead lets it fall through to the next iteration of the arg parsing loop (as either another switch, or a filename)

the problem here being that running (in a script) as a cronjob is another case where bin/post is "not being run in a terminal" so the -d parsing would up completely ignoring the <delete>... string, evne though there was nothing being redirected on stdin.

the workaround is to use echo to give bin/post some stdin, since it was going to expect it for any usage of -d...

echo '<delete><query>zzz</query></delete>' | bin/post -c yyy -host xxx -d 

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: SOLR-13422 bin/post command not working when run from crontab