Where can I set environment variables that crontab will use?

Question

I have a crontab running every hour. The user running it has environment variabless in the `.bash_profile` that work when the user runs the job from the terminal, however, obviously these don't get picked up by crontab when it runs. I've tried setting them in `.profile` and `.bashrc` but they still don't seem to get picked up. Does anyone know where I can put environment vars that crontab can pick up?

Answer 1

Two ways:

You can literally put them right on top of the file, like:

SHELL=/bin/bash

0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/

OR You can put them right before a command like:

0 5 * * 1 SHELL=/bin/bash tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/

The latter will only apply to one particular command whereas the former will apply to all.