I have scheduled a shell script to run at a particular time of day using 'crontab'.
However, the echo commands output are not displayed on the terminal window when the script executes. I tried setting the crontab in the following manner,
.

But still I do not see the output on the screen. How can get the output of a script run by 'cron' on terminal screen ?

Cron normally sends you mail if a cron task generated any output (this
should include error messages).
You could redirect the output to a logfile.

To get the output in a terminal, you have to explicitly open it from the cron job and launch the script as a terminal command. Using KDE I can do something like:
note that you have to set the DISPLAY environment variable, otherwise cron does not know where to open a new terminal. Furtehrmore the user to which the crontab belongs, must have an X session open (take in mind you cannot connect to the X display of another user, since usually you don't have the right permissions).

Finally, you have to find a way to keep the terminal open after the command execution. In konsole, as you can see from my example, there is a --noclose option. You have to find the trick if you use another terminal.

colucix,

Thanks for that answer. An update for any debian users (I'm using Mint15 but Ubuntu etc should be the same).

I am using rdiffbackup so call a script that drives it. My command line is:


With gnome-terminal you can choose behaviour of the terminal when the command finishes. In my case I wanted the terminal to disappear if all backups complete successfully so I didn't. Instead I use the read command after an error to pause the terminal, awaiting user input.

A note for any rdiffbackup users having issues with cron. Cron has a very limited user environment compared with your terminal so you may have to fill in some missing variables for the SSH to work for rdiffbackup. In my case I needed to fill in SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK - the code is for the fish shell ... substituted " for the brackets around the command if you're using bash. The second assumes that the folder *keyring-* and associated file *ssh* is within /run - if its not then find out where your distro hides it and change it (the originator of this idea was searching /tmp for it).

I include this in an old thread because google only cares about hit counts