Help, cron job won't run

[chicken]

Hello to any *nix geeks on my friends list.

Does anyone know how to figure out why a cron job isn't running? Is there a log somewhere that acts as STDERR for cron?

Is there something I forgot? That is, all I did was 'crontab -e' and then save it, which I thought was all, but did I need to use '/etc/init.d/cron stop | start' in order for the daemon to read in the new job? That seems unlikely, especially since I don't have 'sudo' or 'root' on the machine in question anyway. If there is no Log for cron's errors, then is there a checking routine I can run to test my syntax? Similar to the way you can run 'apachectl configtest'? I made sure that to set 'u+x' on the '~myHomeDir/bin/executable.bash' file which my cron calls, and made sure the crontab line lists *my* userid as the owner of the process. I cannot think what else to do. Here is the gist of my crontab entry:

30 0 * * * cmah /home/cmah/bin/run-webalizer.bash

Of course I checked and ran the bash script by hand to make sure it works. And I hope that the '30 0 * * *' means that I want to run the cron job every day at 00:30:00 (30 minutes after midnight).

Comments

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

What you could try is this:

30 0 * * * /home/cmah/bin/run-webalizer.bash >> /home/cmah/webalizer-log 2>&1

This will put the output and the errors into /home/cmah/webalizer-log.

See man 5 crontab for details.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that should work. Nifty icon.