Why cron job is not running

They do not wrap past the end. Ranges and steps can be combined e. Debugging cron commands Check the mail! If required you can filter the cron statements with e.

Check that cron is running If cron isn't running then your commands won't be scheduled If your command is in a different location you can solve this in a couple of ways: Provide the full path to your command. The last command in my crontab doesn't run Cron generally requires that commands are terminated with a new line.

Tell the system what to use when executing your script eg. Improve this answer. The output capture does not work for me, may be because of the sh shell. I think this is more portable Because I ran simple hello world in python with cron, it worked. But my second code was a bit heavy and normally do run but with cron it is not giving any output into the file.

Show 4 more comments. See man cron for more details, if necessary. Munkeh72 Munkeh72 2 2 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. In my case a DigitalOcean box that, at create time, they reset the root password optionally to another one, and apparently until you go in there and change it, all the cron jobs don't run.

Fix is something like sudo -u root passwd — rogerdpack. Uncommon and irregular schedules Cron is all things considered a very basic scheduler and the syntax does not easily allow an administrator to formulate slightly more uncommon schedules. What to do instead? Create multiple batches Rather than a single cron job, create multiple batches that combined result in the desired schedule. Run your batches less frequently Rather than running your batch every 7 minutes, which is a difficult schedule to break down in multiple batches, simply run it every 10 minutes instead.

Start your batches more frequently but exit gracefully when the conditions are not right Since cron syntax is limited you may decide to place more complex conditions and logic in the batch job itself or in a wrapper script around the existing batch job. In bash the seven-minute-job would then look something like something like:! Community Bot 1. HBruijn HBruijn That error report was closed back in with the status of the patch being added to the PHP 5.

Are you sure this is needed? I just tried on PHP 5. It is still needed for PHP 4 though. Xeoncross see date of answer : — gaRex. Yes, that is what confused me since you answered in and the ticket was back in ' What is the cron user's environment? I can't specify the schedule I need in my crontab entry: The schedule entry for crontab is of course defined in man crontab , and you should read this. Seamus Seamus 1 1 silver badge 6 6 bronze badges.

For me, the different environment has always caused issues with cron. This answer should get upvoted more. If applicable Launches the script with nice ionice -c3 to save on resources.

Logs the stdout and stderr of the script in the "logs" directory so that when something goes wrong I can actually find out what happened. It will even launch GUI apps into the userspace:! This can be a massive headache!

You can just set up your tasks and decide how to handle the failure. You could configure it, so it does nothing, restart if it fails up to 5 times, or keep trying until a particular type, etc.

At the end of the day, you have the choice to go with a system that runs Cron every 15 minutes, with all its frustrating and potentially costly drawbacks, or let automation do all of this for you. Using workload automation software makes failure handling so much easier for your engineers and increases their productivity. However, advanced automation software is. If you schedule a job to run at AM, you can rest assured that it will run at some time very close to AM.

So when your Cron job fails, it can retry or notify an operator of the failure. OpCon is packed with automation features that ensure your critical operations are executed on time, every single time. Frustrated that your cron job is not running the way it should? Learn how workload automation software can perform the same jobs as cron, but better.

Skip to main content Your web browser is out of date. Update your browser. Adam Matan. This is what has been causing my Cron job to fail for the last week. Finally figured out that my Date didn't have an escape character backslash for any other folks looking for what the escape character is.

See also How can I execute date inside of a cron tab job? Cron is calling a script that is not executable. If you're used to executing scripts with. Do I have to install something or just restart one of the two?

Example: Firefox launch with cron. First I figured it out myself and then I found your answer! Still thanks a lot!

Permissions problems are quite common, I'm afraid. Note that if you have a crontab line that is set to pipe output to a file that does not yet exist, and the directory for the file is one that the cron user doesn't have access to, then the line will not execute.

If the script being invoked from cron is written in an interpreted language like PHP, you may need to set the working directory in the script itself. Just got caught with this one: the script used to be in the root of my home directory, but then I moved it and updated the crontab and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

Turns out the script was using a relative path, assuming that it was relative to the location of the script but it was in fact relative to the root of my home directory because that was the working directory that cron was using, which is why the script worked when it was in the root of my home directory because the script's expected working directory and it's actual working just happened to coincide.

The system crontabs have an extra field 'user' right before the command-to-run. This is reloaded daily from a crontab entry like:! This covers three separate problems. Can they be split into separate answers? Corrected now. I just spent a good while wondering why a cronjob that I was trying to test every minute in my current hour was not working Easy fix to remove the 'v':! Why is this causing a failure? Buffer issues? Any outputs or errors trriggred via cron jobs is gooing to sent to your mailbox.

My two gotchas: mycronjob file had to be owned by root to run I had to set permissions of the file to - would not run. How can this be debugged? Reviewing cron's error log is the most common way. IIRC 'crontab -e' does a syntax parse after you've edited the file as well - but that might not be universal. Cron daemon could be running, but not actually working. Cron is insanely robust.

I'm not sure but I think this did actually just happen to me. I tried pidof cron and got nothing. Tried using service utility and it said cron was already running. Just ran this command and ran pidof again and I get a result. I haven't had time to pull apart the cron code and check why this works, just a detail I've noticed. Yeah, that was my first thought when writing the afore-mentioneed script.

I forget why I didn't use that, possibly some non-standard behavior that circumvented said solution. Martijn de Milliano. In my case cron and crontab had different owners. The latter is not recommended. Cron is already installed as a service under account LocalSystem. Do you want to remove or reinstall it? The cron service was removed. Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? If you are the only user on this machine, the daemon can run as yourself.

This gives access to all network drives but only allows you as user. To run multiple users, cron must change user context without knowing the passwords. Otherwise you need to have or to create a privileged account.

This script will help you do so. Do you want the cron daemon to run as yourself? Do you want to use another privileged account name? Checking its privileges. INFO: User is a valid privileged account. Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? The cron daemon is now running. Examine also any cron. If you cannot fix the problem, then report it to cygwin cygwin.

Names such as "find" and "date" may refer to Windows programs. Although well documented, this looks like a Cygwin-specific point; does it really belong in askubuntu? Cron jobs won't run if your user's password has expired.

For example: sudo -u root passwd Then follow the instructions, specifying a new password as prompted. The Overflow Blog. Running a script using the cron service, that executes normally from the shell but does not exhibit the same behavior when running from crontab. Another reason can be — not specifying the absolute path of the commands used in the script.