I'm using Red Hat and I need to get cron working and I'm not sure what the problem is. As a test I've done the following:

1) In /etc/cron.d I've created a file called date with the following contents
2) */1 * * * * root date >> /root/thedate
3) This works perfectly. It sends the date every minute to /root/thedate with no problem


Then when I tried the following, it would not work:

1) In /etc/cron.d I changed the file named "date" to contain the following:
2) */1 * * * * root /root/date.sh
3) The contents of /root/date.sh is the following:
#!/bin/sh
date >> /root/thedate
4) I chmoded /root/date.sh to 700 and was able to run it by executing ./date.sh
5) However, crond would not run this cron job and I am confused

Any help is appreciated.

maybe cron isn't running as root

you chmod'd to 700 so that means only root can do anything with the file.

try chmod 755 to see if that helps