Shell scripts and ftp

Hi to anyone who can help me

I have a script that I would like to run as a cron job it simply creates a variable for the current day of the week and then uses this to transfer some files via ftp from a Unix server to a Windows NT server every 15 mins, now my problem is very similar to a thread made by someone else in the fact that from the command line all works well, but submitting the job via cron loses the "day" variable and so the files are transferred to the top directory. Not sure why this is so over to the experts (you) to answer this :-)

My script is as follows:-

#!/bin/bash

date > /var/day

set today=`cat /var/day | cut -c1,2,3`

echo "today is $today"



# output files transfered to ftp_log file


cd /vol/rt11/interfile_out
ls *.ihd > /var/ihdftp_log
ls *.dat > /var/datftp_log

# combine the date and files transferred into a combined log file
cat /var/day /var/ihdftp_log > /var/combined_log
cat /var/datftp_log /var/combined_log > /var/combined_cont_log
cp /var/ftphist_log /var/hist.tmp
cat /var/hist.tmp /var/combined_cont_log > /var/ftphist_log

# Now move the files to correct location

# Start FTP session

cd /vol/rt11/interfile_out
ftp -nv xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > /var/ftplog22 << lab1
user xxxxx xxxxxx
cd healthsci/nuclear/live/$today
pwd
prompt
bin
mdele *.IHD
mdele *.DAT
mput *.ihd
mput *.dat
bye
lab1

/usr/xpg4/bin/rm /var/hist.tmp

________________

It is the $today variable that seems to be lost when running in cron.

(xxxxx used for obvious reasons)
Hope you can help

Having waited for any suggestions from you guys and not getting any response I have split the script into separate ones for each day and cron runs these ok.

A bit of a cop out as I still do not know why my script would run from the command line using the $today variable but not from cron.

I guess its back to the books to learn more about shells

You can use date +%a to get the day of the week. The date executable is in the /bin directory (so is cat, but cut is sometimes in /usr/bin), so cron should pick it up. I usually look at path issues with cron, as most systems only have /bin in the cron path. Also, look in /var/cron/*log for errors or pipe the crontab through mailx to get debug info.