I'm running several cron jobs from /etc/crontab but no logs are created. I read up on how to send output to logs but it just won't work for me. What could the problem be? I also tried sending the log to /home/jeff/log.txt sinc the job is being run as user jeff. The job runs but there is no log created. Why?





# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file.
# This file also has a username field, that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/FWTools-1.2.0/bin_safe

# m h dom mon dow user command

50 5 * * * jeff world6.py
8 6 * * * jeff makeweekly.sh

00 12 * * * jeff world12.py
11 12 * * * jeff makeweekly.sh

30 16 * * * jeff world12.py > \var\log\weatherlog.txt
20 16 * * * jeff makeweekly.sh > \var\log\weatherlog2.txt

50 18 * * * jeff world18.py
11 19 * * * jeff makeweekly.sh

40 23 * * * jeff world0.py
50 23 * * * jeff makeweekly.sh

17 * * * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
47 6 * * 7 root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
52 6 1 * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly
#

Your slashes are wrong. Instead of specifying a directory path, you were escaping characters:

For example, "\var\log\weatherlog.txt" means "varlogweatherlog.txt" in the current directory (wherever that is for a cron job). You meant to specify "/var/log/weatherlog.txt".

DUH!

Such a dumb mistake. I'll fix that and then surely it will work. Thanks for the sharp eye.

I fixed the slashes and now I'm getting the correct logs.

problem solved