I'm having problems with cron on mandrake 10.0 official.
I'm just trying to run a simple script (called "test-script"):

#!/bin/sh
echo "this is a test" > /var/www/test.txt

here is what my crontab looks like:

08 10 * * * root /root/test-script

which should cause "test-script" to run as root at 10:08 (right?)

at 10:09 this is what the end of /var/log/cron/info looks like:

Nov 28 10:08:00 justice CROND[1419]: (root) CMD (root /root/test-script)
Nov 28 10:08:00 justice CROND[1418]: (root) MAIL (mailed 41 bytes of output but got status 0xffffffff )

so it looks like the script got executed.

but /var/www/test.txt does not exist.

can anyone tell me what i'm doing wrong?

thanks in advance,
dbc

ps: the script runs just fine from the command line:
[root@justice root]# ls -l /root/test-script
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 53 Nov 28 10:05 /root/test-script*
[root@justice root]# ls -l /var/www/test.txt
ls: /var/www/test.txt: No such file or directory
[root@justice root]# . test-script
[root@justice root]# more /var/www/test.txt
this is a test
[root@justice root]#

you can see that "test-script" is executable, and that it creates the file when run. but it doesn't look like cron is actually running the script, and i can't find any useful information in the error log (unless maybe i'm looking in the wrong place!)

"the script runs just fine from the command line:"

"so it looks like the script got executed.

but /var/www/test.txt does not exist."

The PATH that cron runs with is pretty skimpy. So cron starts the /root/test-script script and /root/test-script probably fails on "bash command not found" which message is not displayed on the screen. Try setting your PATH in /root/test-script so that the cron demon can find bash and other common commands:

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
export PATH
echo "this is a test" > /var/www/test.txt

------------------------------
Steve Stites

You can also set environment variables in your crontab itself, if that is sometimes more convenient.

See

for some good examples.

I set mine to mail results to me, the ordinary user, instead of root, for example, since I'm the only person
using this computer (I hope!).

To me it looks like it's trying to start a program called root with your script as parameter. Try to remove the sixth parameter and see what happens. Is there any message in root's mail ? Just type 'mail' as root, don't know what the status code means, though.

From doing a little Googgle searching, I'm willing to bet the status code meant the message couldn't be delivered and delivery would be tried again in the future. I'm wondering if your sendmail is set up and usable? I don't see that you mentioned if you normally use it.