“conda activate” is intended for interactive shells and therefore doesn’t work properly with Cron jobs and other non-interactive shell environments. Rather than “bash -l”, consider using conda run.

By default the stdin/stdout/stderr are captured by conda run–no text input or output is seen until after the executable finishes running. For testing scripts, it’s possible to get live stdin/stdout/stderr with the option:

conda run --no-capture-output <exe>

For example, if a Cron job runs a CTest or CDash script that needs to use a Conda Python environment “myenv”, make a Cron job like:

conda run --name myenv ctest -S memcheck.cmake

Cron jobs are single lines only in “crontab -e”. In general more complex Cron jobs are invoked by calling a script from crontab. For example suppose a CMake project using Conda Python needs to be configured, built and tested. Make a cron job script like:

# So CMake finds Conda Python environment "myenv"
conda run --name myenv \
  cmake -Bbuild

cmake --build build --parallel
# preface with "conda run --name myenv" if Python invoked during the build

conda run --name myenv \
  ctest --test-dir build

NOTE: environment variables are defined for all cron jobs at the top of the crontab. The “conda” executable must be on PATH environment variable, or specify the full path to “conda” in each cron job line.

For example, on macOS the crontab PATH might be like:

PATH=/home/username/miniconda3/condabin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/opt/homebrew/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/Apple/usr/bin

In particular, note that environment variables can’t refer to other environment variables like $HOME–type the full path on the system.