Written by Giles Bennett
A number of clients have experienced the same issue following upgrades to 1.8 from existing Magento installations - their Magento cron jobs, which historically had been operating just fine, stop working for no apparent reason.
Magento has two cron scrips, one a bash script (cron.sh) and the other a PHP script (cron.php) - this issue was only happening with those clients who were running their cron jobs by calling the PHP script on a regular basis.
It turned out to be down to a code change in cron.php in Magento 1.8, which would try and use the bash script, in preference to the PHP script, if a shell was available, but in evaluating this was using a function which could give a false positive - making it think that a shell was available when it wasn't. It would then try to use cron.sh, but be unable to do so.
The solution is to tell the script that shell is disabled - in cron.php (which you'll find in the web root of your installation) find the line :
$isShellDisabled = (stripos(PHP_OS, 'win') === false) ? $isShellDisabled : true;and immediately after it, add this :
$isShellDisabled = true;This forces it to continue using the PHP script, rather than the shell script, irrespective of whether it thinks that it can use the shell or not. It's a bit of a dirty hack, but it works!
