[nzlug] cron

[Nevyn]

On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Brendan Murray <xasperated at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nevyn wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone know if there are any special steps required to get cron
>> going in Ubuntu?
>>
>> I'm trying to get cron to run a task for me every 5 minutes or so. So I
>> ran
>>
>> "sudo crontab -e"
>>
>> as I need the job to be run as root. Entered in the following line:
>>
>> */5 * * * * /usr/bin/whatever
>>
>> whatever has an echo command to write a date to a log file (for
>> initial testing). However, it appears the script never gets run. I
>> tried running the script manually and it does as it's supposed to do.
>>
>
> On debian  boxes, I've seen scripts fail to run from crontab that weren't
> started with "#! /bin/sh" or whatever shell you want to run the script as.
> Dunno about ubuntu but presumably they're the same.
>
>
> This one doesn't work
> -----
> # a cron script that doesn't work
> echo "ping"  >> /tmp/logfile
> ------
>
> This one does
> -------------
> #! /bin/sh
> # a cron script that does work
> echo "ping" >> /tmp/logfile

Just figured it out. Turns out crontab appears to write an error log
of your own tasks in your home directory under the name "dead.letter".
So in my case, sudo -i got me into root's directory and having a look
there "showed me the way...."