Crontab command not executed

Question

Coming from Why is my crontab not working, and how can I troubleshoot it? i still don`t know why my command is not executed.

I got same command for root and www-data

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and my cron logs shows that cron is executed every minute

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however, i never got /tmp/crontest.log file. I notice this problem because i wanted to make wordpress external cron (executing php file).

Of course, executing that command from command line is working.

Any tips?

/usr/bin/env is being used to run any given script with preloaded environment variables. The crontab is weird, what do intent to echo to the temp file? — Anatoly, Jul 12 '15 at 19:05
what are the permissions on /tmp? They should be 1777 - rwxrwxrwt. — toppledwagon, Jul 12 '15 at 19:35
I also see a ^M after your cron line - ... `CMD /usr/bin/env &> /tmp/crontest.log^M)` — toppledwagon, Jul 12 '15 at 19:36

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

3

Your crontab file has the wrong lineendings - it's got carriage return (CR)/linefeed (LF) endings. You can see this in your first screenshot, where there's a [dos] after the filename. Unix systems expect lines to be terminated by linefeeds only, whereas Windows systems use a carriage return/linefeed pair.

There are a few ways to correct this. As you seem to be familiar with vi, I'd suggest this to replace the CR/LFs with LFs. Just edit your crontab and then do the search and replace.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

Community

1

answered Jul 12 '15 at 20:12

mjturner

492
3
9

perfect answer. I`m using c#/windows to communicate with linux via ssh and i know that there is difference between windows and linux new line, but i edited cron import file with webmin, deleted the new line, reenter and save with webmin, but looks like webmin know it is dos file and save new line in dos style? – Novkovski Stevo Bato Jul 12 '15 at 23:21
If the used editor is `vi` or `vim`, do `:set notextmode` followed by `:wq` to change all CR-LF to LF only. – ott-- Jan 10 '16 at 07:11

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '16 at 05:39

The dos2unix command can convert DOS CR/LF characters in your files to proper LFs. Probably easier than messing around in an editor.
Depending on your editor, it may not leave a trailing LF at the last line either. Some cron implementations still fail to run the last command in a crontab file unless terminated with an LF character at the end.

Crontab command not executed

2 Answers2