Hi,
It is SLES 10.3 VM. Suddenly cron stopped working on this and I am not able to figure out, where it is failing. It is not running with even root. I gave a simple job of redirection of 'date' command, that also doesn't work. I restarted cron service and still it is same.
Below is from /var/log/messages, not sure, what it means
Any help on this please ?

With the risk of being too obvious and/or utterly wrong, have you tried running this test command, instead of in a specific given minute, minute by minute? ( */1 * * * ) And giving time for cron to reload the cron tabs?

I'm afraid it may be just reloading the crontab in that very same minute but never running the actual command, as it's not repeated after that.

But that's just a wild guess, I'm quite clueless.


Nah, now that I think about it, it barely makes sense, you must have other stuff on cron and noticed it isn't working already...

Step one is to understand whether or not the cron daemon is running. Step two is to understand whether or not the daemon is reading in your cron job (how and where did you add it to the system?). Step three is to validate that the daemon is not encountering an error when attempting to run your command.

From what I see in the info you've posted, it appears that cron has reloaded at 7:37PM, which is when you had a job set to run. The date redirection would seem to be able to execute, but A) I have no idea whether you installed that job as root or some other user (and it matters since you're trying to write to a file in an area that would likely need root permissions) and B) you didn't show whether or not the redirected data created a file at all and whether there was anything in it.