Thinking Sphinx indexing succeeding on command line, but failing in Cron job.

Answer 1

Is the crontab owned by the same user as the one you are logged in as when you run things manually?

Since it seems like a clear PATH issue, and cron runs with a restricted PATH (i.e. not what's in your .profile), try adding this to the top of your crontab file.

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

Or if you don't want to modify cron's PATH, you could symlink the files you need into /usr/sbin, which is likely in the PATH by default.