Hello All,

I am trying to setup the cron on my system. For test, I am trying to run a shell script every minute.

Below is how my crontab is setup.
crontab -l
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
* * * * * /home/IM/test.sh

Below is my shell script.
cat /home/IM/test.sh
#! /bin/sh

echo "Hello there"

My crond is kicking every minute, I see,

crond: USER root pid 1683 cmd /home/IM/test.sh
crond: USER root pid 1685 cmd /home/IM/test.sh
crond: USER root pid 1687 cmd /home/IM/test.sh
crond: USER root pid 1689 cmd /home/IM/test.sh

But it seems that script is being executed. Any clues ?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-script-36931/

You might want to add your SHELL and PATH variables to the script itself.

Is the script executable by the user running the cron job you show?

There are other caveats besides the path that can trip up users when running scripts from cron. Basically when a script runs via cron it isn't connected to a terminal/display so it can't display messages.

Try the following. It will display a popup message via cron.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ronjob-937682/

Are you saying, that if the the script invoked by the cron has echo, that echo would *not* be flushed to the console ?

Yes, Script is executable.

Below is updated script after your comments. But still no echo output on the console.
#! /bin/sh
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/local/bin

/bin/echo "Hello there"

crond has no console, it will not be able to echo anything (and jobs initiated by crond will inherit its state, so they will have no console too).

Awesome info. I ran crond in foreground and bingo. I see the echo messages.
crond: USER root pid 1879 cmd /home/IM/test.sh
Hello there
crond[1877]: crond: USER root pid 1882 cmd /home/IM/test.sh
Hello there

I am going to move this in solved state.

Thanks everyone for pitching in.

It isn't true you can't do echo from a cron job. What you can do is send the output of cron scripts to a log file.

* * * * * /home/IM/test.sh >>/tmp/test.log 2>&1

The echo you did would show up in that log (along with any errors should they occur). You could also set separate logging for individual commands within the script itself and also set stderr (file descriptor 2) to a separate log.

I notice you mention X11 as well though you're not actually using it here. For things that require an X display you'd have a similar problem because you're not on a display but you can use a tool called xvfb to run X sessions in the background.