[mythtv-users] Cannot locate your home directory. Please set the environment variable HOME or MYTHCONFDIR

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/27/2008 08:19 AM, Phill Edwards wrote:
>> Are you using the mythbackend start scripts that Nick Morrott worked
>> on?  I think they're a standard part of the ATrpms packages.  They're
>> the (fedora) ones at
>> http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/branches/release-0-21-fixes/mythtv/contrib/init_scripts
> I have just started using these on my CentOS 5.1 system as I too am
> getting these errors. But unfortunately it hasn't fixed the problem
> for me and I'm still getting this in my cron job output:
>
> 2008-05-27 16:45:16.854 Cannot locate your home directory. Please set the
> +environment variable HOME or MYTHCONFDIR
>   

Uh, yeah, those scripts (that properly set the environment to contain a 
valid HOME) don't start your cron job...  :)

> I thought these scripts would fix it. As per Michael's advice a while
> back I also put this line in /etc/crontab:
> HOME=/home/mythtv
>
> That worked for a while but things broke again after updating the
> mythtv packages.
>
> I'm not sure what to do now.

Some cron programs have special rules on specifying home in a crontab.  
Try man crontab or man 5 fcrontab or ...

Or, it may have to do with permissions (i.e. the user running the 
crontab doesn't have permission to access the /home/mythtv/.mythtv 
directory and/or its contents).

Also, check out your system security configuration.  (Yeah, I realize 
that's a very wide net I'm casting.)  If you're doing things like using 
sudo to run the program as another user, you might need to use sudo -H.

Mike