Script not working in crontab

Chances are you need to set the full path for binaries like screen since when the cron job runs, it will not have the $PATH values set the same way you as a user have those set when you login via Terminal or SSH. This answer on Stack Overflow is a decent explanation of the whole deal.

So I would recommend you change your script from this:

screen -A -m -d -S minecraftserver /home/minecraft/scripts/startServer.sh

To this:

/path/to/screen -A -m -d -S minecraftserver /home/minecraft/scripts/startServer.sh

And replace /path/to/screen with the actual full path which you can easily obtain using which like this:

which screen

The output would be something like:

/usr/bin/screen

Or, you could set the $PATH by actually placing it in your script like this:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

Of course that should match your actual PATH value on your system which you can get by typing in the following:

echo $PATH

But I personally prefer the fullpath method since it’s cleaner to me and $PATH values often change so you don’t want to have a wish-mash of values in your Bash scripts.

PS: Also, a small thing but your Bash script should have the actual Bash interpretter value set in the “shebang” at the top like this so your script would look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
/path/to/screen -A -m -d -S minecraftserver /home/minecraft/scripts/startServer.sh

Of course that /bin/bash should match your systems actual Bash path by running which bash but I doubt it would not be in the /bin/bash path on a mode install.

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