So, I have device on my network which sits there listening on a port for a connection, and when a connection is made it dumps ascii data out. I need to capture that data to a file. I wrote a dead simple shell script that does this: #!/bin/bash #Config Variables. Age is in Days. DATA_ROOT=/root/data FILENAME=data_`date +%F`.dat HOST=device COMPRESS_AGE=3 #Sanity Checks if [ ! -e $DATA_ROOT ] then echo "The directory $DATA_ROOT seems to not exist. Please create it." exit 1 fi if [ -e $DATA_ROOT/$FILENAME ] then echo "You seem to have extracted data already today. Aborting" exit 1 fi #Get Data nc $HOST 2202 > $DATA_ROOT/$FILENAME #Compress old Data find $DATA_ROOT -type f -mtime +$COMPRESS_AGE -exec gzip {} \; exit 0 It works great when I run it by hand, but when I run it from cron, it doesn't capture any of the output. If I replace nc with telnet I see the initial telnet headers about escape sequences and whatnot, but not the data. Ideas? I've tried forcing bash to act like an interactive shell with -i. I've tried redirecting both stderr and stdout. I know it's got to be some silly simple thing, but I'm utterly failing. This is driving me nuts... EDIT I also just noticed that the nc processes from all my previous attempts at this have been siting sleeping, and when I killed them, cron sent me a bunch of non-sensical error messages. At least now I have something to dig into!