Hi, I am trying to setup a cron job in my Fedora distribution but its not working.

These are the steps I took.
1) Setup a perl script in /home/documents/test.pl - Script just gathers the local time.
2) Setup a cron.test file in /etc/cron.d/
3) Executed the perl script and made sure it wrote to cron.test correctly - It works.
4) Create a cron.job file in /etc/cron.d/
5) I changed the permissions of both these files to RWX. Also changed the group from root to my user name.
6) crontab cron.job(load file to system)

This is what my cron.job file looks like.

cron.job
1 * * * * jma perl /home/documents/test.pl

Doesn't seem like the cronjob is working because cron.test never gets written. /etc/log/cron has no entries as well, so it doesn't seem like its entering the function. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong???

I know it is weird, but I have had the problem where the files in /etc/cron.daily (or weekly, hourly,etc) have to contain no dot (.).. If they contain a dot (eg backup.sh) they do not work, but without the dot, (backup) it does... I think it is to do with the way run-parts works....

So try renaming cron.job to cron-job and it should work.!

How do you know it doesn't work? Is it meant to output the time in some way? If so, where to? I take it nothing is emailed to the user?

Itake it jma is a user - have you tried giving a full path to perl (eg /bin/perl)

I tried cron-job with no luck.

Yes, I have a perl script that when run, will write to the output file cron.test. I don't see any input in cron.test so I know that the cron job hasn't started correctly. No output is emailed to the user eitehr. I also tried the full path to perl with no luck

Sorry - a bit shorter, cause my browser crashed - and i lost the original message I was going to post....

Test the script as the user, so you know that it works...
Make sure you use full paths for the output file... cron does not run from where you think it might, so relative paths are a bit no-no
Check the user has permission for writing to the output file.
as billymayday said, give full path for perl:
1 * * * * jma /usr/bin/perl /home/documents/test.pl
(determine path to perl by running 'which perl')

Hope these help (if not post the contents of the script test.pl here - there might be something... - feel free to replace security info with example data (foo, bar, USERNAME, PASSWORD, SERVER)

Can you post the script?

Sure. Here is my test.pl script and my cron-job file that is in my home directory(/home/jma/Documents). I know the script works because when I run it, it writes correctly to "cron.test".

test.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
open(DATA, ">/home/jma/Documents/cron.test");
@Now = localtime(time);
print DATA "@Now\n";
exit;

cron-job
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
1 * * * * jma /usr/bin/perl /home/jma/Documents/test.pl

I think the permissions are ok because I changed cron.test to "777".

I finally got it to work. I think it was this line in my cron-job file.

1 * * * * jma /usr/bin/perl /home/jma/Documents/test.pl

I took out the jma and it worked. Thought I had to include this. Not sure why I don't but I guess it works now.

1 * * * * /usr/bin/perl /home/jma/Documents/test.pl

Thanks for the advice.

I found no "PATH" statement in the man pages for crontab. Be that as is may, you ask cron to run every minute the job "jma" which seems to be undefined as far as I can see. I don't know whether the "/usr/bin/perl" statement is necessary, so you might try just "/home/jma/Documents/test.pl" in the command field of crontab...

<edit> Ooops, crossposting. Glad you solved it by your own means.

I see specifying the user is not supported the way you were(I was not sure about that...)

You would be running the job a root - not always a good idea, unless needed.

If you want to run the job as a user, run "crontab -u jma -e" to edit the crontab for user jma

You should not need to specify /usr/bin/perl if you have the magic shell comment at the top (#!/usr/bin/perl) of your script you are calling.

Hope this bit helps....

PS Good to see you fixed it

These are the fields of an crontab entry(in order)
1.Min 0-59
2.Hrs 0-23
3.Day of month 1-31
4.Month 1-12
5.Week-day 0-6
6.Command sh ./script

Except crontab (as in /etc/crontab) has a user defined, and I think that's what threw people