crontab not working

[wonderingwout]

Hi,

Recently I installed a new Ubuntu server (8.04 LTS) with Rails and all went very smooth.
Things are running better than ever.

There's only one little thing I can't figure out.
The crontab is not running.

This might be a silly question, but I always used systems that have the crontab ready to go.
On Ubuntu I had to install it but I can't get it to work.

And also, there are various files named 'crontab' in the system.
The command crontab -e opens a different file than the one fount in /etc.

I'm a tiny bit confused.
Could you guys give me some hints?

Thanx in advance!

[cdenley]

Hi,

Recently I installed a new Ubuntu server (8.04 LTS) with Rails and all went very smooth.
Things are running better than ever.

There's only one little thing I can't figure out.
The crontab is not running.

This might be a silly question, but I always used systems that have the crontab ready to go.
On Ubuntu I had to install it but I can't get it to work.

And also, there are various files named 'crontab' in the system.
The command crontab -e opens a different file than the one fount in /etc.

I'm a tiny bit confused.
Could you guys give me some hints?

Thanx in advance!

Each user has their own crontab. The crontab for root would be at /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root, but you shouldn't edit this file directly.


man crontab

The file /etc/crontab is the system-wide crontab, and not edited by the "crontab" command (as explained in the comments at the top of the file).

[albinootje]

And also, there are various files named 'crontab' in the system.
The command crontab -e opens a different file than the one fount in /etc.

Yes. There is indeed /etc/crontab which I've seen people use before.

I stick to "crontab -e" to help me prevent syntax errors, and that has always worked for me.

Are you trying to run a script ? Does it have the right permissions ?
What about errors in the logfiles ?
Did you set up smtp and an alias for "root" ? If you did this then you can usually receive the cron errors by email.

[wonderingwout]

Well now I edited the file through:


crontab -u root -e

I'm running a simple job to generate a new xml file for a website.
In the crontab file I've put:


05 * * * * /usr/local/bin/generate.sh

But still it doesn't work.
When I run:


/usr/local/bin/generate.sh

in the cli it works perfectly.
I guess I need to start digging in the log files. to see what's going wrong.

[cdenley]

The mistake I usually make with scripts started by cron is that they don't have environment variables like "PATH", so you need to use full paths for any commands you run.

[wonderingwout]

Could have been a problem but I already tried that.
This is what my crontab file looks like:


PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

05 * * * * /usr/local/bin/generate.sh

Curl, the only command used in the generate.sh file is located in /usr/bin/curl
Should cron be enabled maybe?

[albinootje]

05 * * * * /usr/local/bin/generate.sh


You want this to be run every 5 minutes ?
If so, please check these :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=83356
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=184915

[cdenley]

That runs every hour 5 minutes after the hour. If you want every 5 minutes:


*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/generate.sh

I tested it, and it seems to work for me. Did you make it executable? If you're still having problems, post the script, because everything else is correct.

[wonderingwout]

Yes!
Great.

The */5 did the trick.
Actually quite stupid of me to think that 05 would be every 5 minutes :o

Anyway, muchas gracias!
Thanx for the help.