Do the following as root user
create a crontabfile with the following entry

@reboot touch /root/crontest.tst
(remember a newline after entry)

Load the crontabfile with
$] crontab crontabfile

Check if it was loaded with
$] crontab -l

If so reboot.

Upon reboot there will be no file in /root called crontest.tst as there should be.

I now tried it on two MX18 installs on two different computers.
On both of them cron doesnt execute @reboot.
I suggest the MX18 developers look at which runlevel cron executes crontab.
This cron bug is as old as 2011 and keeps reappearing.

try using the results of to provide the path for the touch executable on your install.

The implementation of cron MX is using may not support @reboot, it is NOT a standard cron feature, is documented only as an extension on the WWW man page.

1 members found this post helpful.

I solved it using Nixcraft.
It ended up being something buggy in the MX packaging inherited from Debian.

Here is the post that solved it.
https://www.nixcraft.com/t/solved-cr...ian-linux/1858