A question on cron
 

I'm logged in as root and I edited crontab with

and added this line to the crontable

at that time I do see that the file itworked.txt is created, however, there data "sick" is not in the file.

What am I doing wrong?

cron is likely interpreting these as separate things.

You need to so something like
"/usr/bin/echo sick" > /home/trist007/itworked.txt

Did you try
in the command line and did it work...

I also remember you had to do a redirection, i think

hope that helps

I understand that the >&1 redirects the output to that variable, but what is the 2 for?

Maybe it's the extra "*" at your crontab entry. You need 5 fields before the command you want to run.

Got it to work with

So what's that 2 for after itworked.txt?
Also, what if i wanted a certain user to execute that would it have been?

2 is the file descriptor for STDERR, and using it in your crontab means that any errors will go to /dev/null.
If you want a certain user to execute a cronjob, you should create a crontab for that user