I'm having a ridiculous time with a cron not running, and there are no errors showing up in the cron log. I'm running centos5 i386, and the following script will run absolutely perfeclty when running from command, however, in cron it does not work. I've read on many forum posts that sometimes you have to set the PATH since cron does not see the same directory listing as a user, however, I do not think that is the case here since my other cron script with the same directory structure works fine.

I'm running the following shell script (seen as generate in cron below):

fairly simple, here is my cron:

You will notice the .sh is missing on generate because I have read a few other threads where people said sometimes cron doesn't like the .sh extension when executing a script. So I've tried using PATH, tried removing and using the .sh extension, but still no luck. elmador_backup.sh works perfectly fine, however, map generate does not.

Does anyone have any suggestions on why this may not be running? I want it to run every minute.

try it with full path.

Do you mean, for example "/usr/bin/convert" instead of "convert"?

Yes, I did. Using full path is good thing to do in crontab or any script gets run by cron.

Tried using /usr/bin/convert but still no luck I also tried removing the lines with convert altogether and it still did not run in cron.

how about date? /usr/bin/date

"set -e" means "exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status". Try commenting out that line or replace temporarily for debugging purposes with "set -vx"?

That was it, it worked after changing from set -e to set -vx.

Just out of curiosity, is there another place where cron errors would show? I've been looking in /var/log/cron but it doesn't seem to show any error messages, just simply which user has run a cron. I've browsed through many threads and everyone else says that /var/log is the place to be.

Then you can comment out the "set -vx" line and spare yourself getting emailed any output if none is required. By default cron emails the user any output it the "MAILTO" variable is set.

Do you have an empty line at the end of the cron file?
Is this your own cron, or is it /etc/crontab? In the latter case you have to specify a user.

Not running files with .sh extension is nonsense. But better use full paths, and call the program to execute the script explicitely, eq. /bin/bash /path/to/your/script.sh The script file does not have to be executable.

With intervals so short I usually prefer a continuous loop in my script:
jlinkels

Is it showing that it ran in cron at all? You could try appending something like
"> /tmp/generate.log 2>&1"
to your cron entry to catch any errors or messages being output. Also, what others said, always use full path and file names.

Also, cron will attempt to email the user (or root ) if it has an error.

That depends on the version a little bit. dillon's lightweight cron daemon tries to email the use output of the command run.