What is Wrong with my CRON?
 

With the better advice of members on this board, ive been playing with cron a bit for automation. However, I cant seem to get cron to run my custom scripts.

For example Ill try the following:

# crontab
11 14 12 9 * /root/school/at/crontest
cnrtl D

the only line in this script is:
date >> curdate

curdate exists in the at directory
so i expected this to run at 2:11 today, but it didnt.

now if i do something like
# crontab
11 14 12 9 * date >> /root/school/at/curdate
cnrtl D

that will work, but why not my script?

ive run the script on my own and it works fine, just not with cron?

1) Add this as the first line of your script:

#!/bin/sh

Your terminal might understand how to interpret your script, but crond can't, so the system will have to depend on this line to know how to execute it.

2) I recently learned a good lesson (:rolleyes:) on paths. System applications will probably always work, but in other cases it might be a fine idea to specify the entire path which you'd get when using "whereis application".

tried adding #!/bin/sh, which i should get in the habit of, but still didnt work. any other ideas?

Try using * * * * * to make the cronjob run every minute.. Maybe you just got the date wrong or something like that :)