linux - "tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified " error logged by CRON process

Question

We have a shell script which is run by CRON. The shell script in turn runs a python script which downloads files from an FTP server and then runs a java log processor on those files. The process runs just fine, except that I keep on getting CRON emails even if there is no error. At least, I think there is no error. The cron email has two lines, out of which one of the lines is

tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified

After researching a bit, I found that it's something to do with setting the $TERM variable. I am not sure, how to do that. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Something in the script is calling the tput binary. tput attempts to inspect the $TERM variable to determine the current terminal so it can produce the correct control sequences. There isn't a terminal when cron is running so you get that error from tput.

You can either manually assign a TERM value to the cron job (likely dumb or something similar to that) or (and this is likely the better solution) you can find out what is calling tput and remove that call.