Testing Cron on Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu. ...) - thanks to Stack Overflow

Nice diagnostic technique I used when the behavior of cron (for automated regressions) on our RedHat servers was suspect:
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Ok, let's start over again.

Create a file, say cron.txt, with exactly the following contents (1 line):

* * * * * touch $HOME/CRON_IS_RUNNING

(Do not create CRON_IS_RUNNING manually.) Run

crontab cron.txt

which should quietly produce no output, then

crontab -l

which should print

* * * * * touch $HOME/CRON_IS_RUNNING

Wait a minute or so, perhaps 2 minutes, then

ls -l $HOME/CRON_IS_RUNNING

which should print something like

-rw-r--r-- 1 yourname yourgroup 0 2011-08-23 20:11 CRON_IS_RUNNING

If this all works, it will confirm that you can run cron jobs.

If that's successful, the problem may be with your test.py command. Does it work when you run it from the command line? If it works from the command line but not from cron, test.py might have some dependency on environment variables (cron jobs run with fewer environment variables set than interactive commands typically do).

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Testing Crontab on Debian Ubuntu - Stack Overflow

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