I use crontab to do some tasks in background. I have a Python script, I just put it into crontab not long ago. But I got a mail from crontab, the script raised ImportError.

It imports PyQuery, which I just knew and started to use it for my own good. I installed it into my home directory not system-wide. Of course, environment variable PYTHONPATH is correct when I am running that script. But its not the environment that cron can have.

I didnt know how to resolve until I read /etc/crontab. It has these lines before the table of tasks:

# Global variables
SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

So, I added the following to my crontab:

PYTHONPATH="/home/livibetter/lib/python2.5:/usr/local/lib64/python2.6"

Which is from my .bash_profile.

That resolved.