How can I determine if a python script is executed from crontab?

Question

I would like to know how can I determine if a python script is executed from crontab?

I don't want a solution that will require adding a parameter because I want to be able to detect this even from an imported module (not the main script).

Answer 1

Check its PPID - the ID of its parent process. Compare that to the cron pid; If they are the same, it was invoked by the crontab.

This can be done by:

$ sudo ps -Af | grep cron | grep -v grep
root  6363  1  0 10:17 ?  00:00:00 /usr/sbin/cron

The PID of the cron process in this example is 6363. It is worth mentioning that the PPID of cron is 1 - the init process.

Now find out what is the PID of your python program:

$  sudo ps -Af | grep SorinSbarnea.py
adam  12992  6363  1 12:24 pts/2  00:04:21 /usr/bin/python SorinSbarnea.py

Its PID is 12992 and PPID is 6363, so it was indeed invoked by the cron process.

EDIT:

The cron process might not invoke your process directly. Hence, you'll have to traverse the PPIDs from your process upwards, till reaching PPID=1 or PPID=/usr/sbin/cron's PID. This can easily be done using a small shell or python script; just parse the output of ps:

$ cat /proc/12992/status
....
Pid:    12992
PPid:   7238
Uid:    1000    1000    1000    1000
Gid:    1000    1000    1000    1000
...

The next step would be checkig /proc/7238, and so forth. Again, This is really easy to implement using shell or python script.

Thanks, @digitalarbeiter and @Noufal Ibrahim for pointing it out in your comments.

Answer 2

Not quite what you asked, but maybe what you want is os.isatty(sys.stdout.fileno()), which tells if stdout is connected to (roughly speaking) a terminal. It will be false if you pipe the output to a file or another process, or if the process is run from cron.

Answer 3

set an environment variable at the cron command invocation. That works even within a module, as you can just check os.getenv()

Answer 4

An easier workaround would be to pass a flag to the script only from the crontab, like --crontab, and then just check for that flag.

Answer 5

If you want to detect this from an imported module, I would have the main program set a global variable in the module, which would output different things depending on the value of this global variable (and have the main program decide how to set the variable through a flag that you would use in your crontab). This is quite robust (comparing to studying PPIDs).