I have a question for you which may be a problem with PowerTOP, alternatively, 
it may be a problem with Cron.

I have written an ugly little script and I have run into an issue which I 
believe may be a bug, please take a second to check this out, and, if you have 
time, shed some light...

The script that I have written is as follows:

#!/bin/bash -e
powertop -t 3 -d 1 > /media/disk/powertop_raw
txt2html --infile /media/disk/powertop_raw --title "power usage" --prepend_file 
/media/disk/web/txt2htmlhead.html --append_file 
/media/disk/web/txt2htmlfoot.html --outfile /media/disk/web/powertop.html
sudo -u nobody cp /media/disk/web/powertop.html /media/disk/web/index.html
exit 0

...Essentially writing the PowerTOP output to a webpage.

Here is the weird thing, if I run it directly from the BASH prompt, it works 
just great, if I run it as a Cron job, it fails miserably at the first step, 
with the symptoms that you see in the subject, the -NaN valiues and a truncated 
wake-up list.

An example of the incorrect values are as follows:

PowerTOP 1.9    (C) 2007 Intel Corporation

Collecting data for 6 seconds
Cn                Avg residency
C0 (cpu running)        ( nan%)
C1                0.0ms ( nan%)
C2                0.0ms ( nan%)
C3                0.0ms ( nan%)
P-states (frequencies)
no ACPI power usage estimate available
Top causes for wakeups:

Suggestion: Enable USB autosuspend by pressing the U key or adding
usbcore.autosuspend=1 to the kernel command line in the grub config

The Cron job is being run as Root.

When run as a Cron job, it fails at the first step, when writing the output to 
the powertop_raw file.  Again, if I run it from the BASH prompt, it goes just 
swimmingly.

I have tried saving the script as a file and running it from Cron as well as 
just pasting that huge ugly string directly in the crontab itself.

I am running Powertop 1.9-1 on Ubuntu 7.10.

Thoughts?

Regards,

-Ben

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