cron job not executing the binary in the time specified

Question

I would like to check which is the environment being used if executing a cron job. I had it working before however it stopped at some point.

This is my cron job in the crontab file:

20 13 * * * /usr/bin/env >> /home/user/folder1/environment1.log

With this line, I am expecting to dump the environment variables to the environment1.log file.

Does anybody have a suggestion of what to check?

Answer 1

EDIT: I have found a link on SO related to this. It is suggested to add 2>&1 to the end like:

* * * * * myjob.sh >> /var/log/myjob.log 2>&1

to correctly handle the redirection of the output. Some more information on the '2>&1' here.

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A few things to check:

• Does the user who is running the job have access to write to that location?
• Can you run the command in the command line, and do you get the correct output?
• Can you write the output to /tmp/some_filename.log?
• The line you have implies the job will run at 13:20. Is this the time you were expecting?

Answer 2

You can check the cron log to see if the event fired or not. On my centos unix, the path is:

/var/log/cron

I also have it configured so that the log rotate keeps around 30 days of logs, so I can check if something goes wrong.

The other thing I'd check is if the cron service is running. In Centos:

service crond status

You can also check it with:

ps -ef | grep crond