Automatic workaround for well known error "Cron run failed"

Hi all.

Bored of manually deleting the "cron_semaphore" register from the "variable" table (or doing it manually with the Unstick module and every 24 hours, finally I did a workaround to fix it automatically. I tested it for 1 week now and it is working well, I can forget now to do it manually.

It is a simply shell script executed by the cron system every 12 hours (my website Idolium is new and, actually, there is few traffic, so I run cron every 6 hours), that deletes automatically the "cron_semaphore" register, if it exists in the "variable" table. You can add a "delete cache" commands, but for me isnt necessary.

You only need permission to execute crontab (to program the script every X hours), the wget command (or something similar) and in my case, a MySQL database (I supose you can do something similar for Postgre)

This is the script "runcron.sh":

#!/bin/bash

echo "Running Cron..."
/usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/cron.php
echo "Running mySql..."
mysql -h YOUR_DATABASE_HOST -u YOUR_DATABASE_USER -pYOUR_DATABASE_PASSWORD YOUR_DATABASE_NAME < cron.sql
echo "Running Cron for 2nd time..."
/usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/cron.php

IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Yes, the -pYOUR_DATABASE_PASSWORD parameter is all thogether (see MySQL documentation)
- Yes, we need to execute cron 2 times, dont know why but if you only execute it 1 time it dont works.
- I'm executing an sql script rather than a command directly.

The "cron.sql" script im executing is like that:

DELETE FROM variable WHERE name = 'cron_semaphore';
commit;

You can save this 2 files where you want and program to execute it in crontab. This is my crontab:

30 */12 * * * sh runcron.sh

which means that I'm executing this at 0.30 and at 12.30 (every 12 hours)

I hope this can help someone to avoid the need of check the Logs every day to control the cron job.