Raspberry Pi Dropbox Uploader Script Run on Startup

Question

I've setup my Raspberry Pi (running the latest Rasbpian) to use Andrea Fabrigzi's Dropbox Uploader (https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader). In using this I've aimed to be able to download files from a folder on my Dropbox account and onto a USB device mounted on my Pi. Now all this works however I've been unable to get this running on START UP. I've made a simple script that is as follows;

/home/pi/Dropbox-Uploader/dropbox_uploader.sh download /testFolder /home/pi/usbdrv

This script runs perfectly well (I've made it an executable through chmod +x), however when I attempt to get it running on startup it does absolutely nothing. I've tried rc.local, init.d, crontab and a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. Any help would be very, very appreciated, thank you.

• vaha: May it fail due to an early start before udev to mount the usb drive?
• Varad A G: Can you tell how did you make your crontab entry. I will suggest an answer below tell me if it works.

Answer 1

You can use @reboot option in crontab to start a script on reboot. I have found this easiest way of scheduling.

Below are the steps:

Step 1: Open the crontab using command sudo crontab -e
Step 2: @reboot /home/pi/Dropbox-Uploader/dropbox_uploader.sh download /testFolder /home/pi/usbdrv 1>/dev/null 2>&1

I have my cron working fine at reboot and config looks like below. Just for your reference.

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h dom mon dow command
@reboot python /home/pi/utils/dateDisplay.py 1>/dev/null 2>&1