This is on a SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) 9 server.

We noticed a new cron job we put into place in /etc/cron.daily wasn't running. I then created a cron job via crontab -e to run every minute:

1 * * * * /usr/bin/touch /root/test.file

The file never gets created. I verified the cron daemon is running.

Any troubleshooting suggestions?

Thanks.

D'oh - deleted - missed that you'd said you verified the daemon was running.

Is there a /var/log/cron and if so have you checked it?

i got the entry in crontab -e working by changing the "1" to "*". However, nothing in cron.daily seems to be working. Is it possible to setup cron so it logs results for each cron job being run in cron.houry?

Thanks.

/var/log/cron should give you entries as to which jobs run but won't give you full detail. You can get that by changing the entry to:

/var/log/cron will let you know if it got scheduld to run. If it did then /tmp/touch.log will let you know what happened when it tried.

Also I did a test with this on my Fedora Core 4 box and found it didn't kick off until cron.hourly ran (even though there is nothing in cron.hourly directory). It may be that Linux cron (unlike Unix cron) only updates the schedule once an hour. Your change to "*" in the first position may simply have happened just before the last hour mark so may not have been why it ran. Unfortunately I don't see anything in the crond or crontab man page to state this. Doing a sighup of crond didn't help nor did a stop and start of the service.

Check the /etc/crontab file to see when the daily conjob is scheduled to run and then check the /var/log/cron to see if the cron got executed.

If the cron is being run as a general user , he will not be able to write to /root ( roots home Dir ).