Cant run cron job as www-data

[astarmathsandphysics]

I opened astarmathsandphysics.log an emptied the contents then saved it without starting rsyslog.
Then I ran
sudo /usr/bin/google-sitemapgen --config=/usr/share/doc/google-sitemapgen/examples/astarmathsandphysics.xml

and log file was empty when the command finished executing. Probably the script does not write to the file.

[SeijiSensei]

I could but I thought it would be bad practiice to have a file owned by root accessible via the internet.

Not really. All Google does is download the file. Also the file won't be executable.

If you're really paranoid about this, run the script as root and include

chown www-data:www-data /path/to/the/file
chmod 444 /path/to/the/file

at the end of the script.

[astarmathsandphysics]

I will execute as root and have written another cron job to change owbership of all files in /var/www to www-data:www-data once a week.
Once is not enough because the script generates more files periodically and these are owned by root.

[Keith_Helms]

I will execute as root and have written another cron job to change owbership of all files in /var/www to www-data:www-data once a week.
Once is not enough because the script generates more files periodically and these are owned by root.

So you have the script running successfully as a cron job now?

[SeijiSensei]

I will execute as root and have written another cron job to change owbership of all files in /var/www to www-data:www-data once a week.
Once is not enough because the script generates more files periodically and these are owned by root.

I was speaking more about writing a "wrapper" script that invokes the Google map generator and then changes the ownership. Something like this:

#!/bin/bash
MAP=/path/to/the/map.xml

chown root:root $MAP
chmod 600 $MAP

/usr/bin/google-sitemapgen --config=/usr/share/doc/google-sitemapgen/examples/astarmathsandphysics.xml

chown www-data:www-data $MAP
chmod 444 $MAP

[astarmathsandphysics]

I will try that