While running a cron job in Linux, I sometimes get this error and I had been struggling to solve this until I came across this post.
Although that particular post mentions the cause being Vagrant, mine was due to a cron job.
First the solution …
Modify .profile under home folder
Open ~/.profile
Replace the following line –
mesg n || true
with
tty -s && mesg n
The reason for this is given very well in the post linked above.
Whenever a cron job runs, it’s running in a non-interactive login shell. That is, there’s no place to show any output. The command mesg n ensures that no other user can write your terminal device.
But since the cron is running from a non-interactive shell, there is no terminal device to start with! This is what gives the error.
This error usually occurs when there’s a shell command being run from the cron which give an output in the terminal.