Offlineimap succeeds at prompt but fails via cron job

[Paul Hinze]

Joseph LP <ootput at gmail.com> on 2009-11-20 at 06:55:
> I've an issue with Offlineimap 6.2.0 on Debian Squeeze whereby the command works
> perfectly fine when launched manually at command line, but fails when run on a
> cron schedule.

The error you included unfortunately doesn't make it immediately obvious where
the problem is coming from, so it could be either dovecot or offlineimap that
is choking there.

More often than not, however, things that work in a normal environment but
break in cron have to do with issues with the shell environment.

For debugging this I usually see if the command in question works via 
`env -i $COMMAND` (start with an empty environment and run $COMMAND) and then I
start to look at the output of `env` run as my user and try and determine what
environment variables might be getting relied upon.

For more strategies on getting to the bottom of this I'd take a look at some of
the top hits on a google search for some combination of '[debug|troubleshoot]
cron job'. 

Hope this helps,

Paul