UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I've been puzzling over cronjobs for the last few hours. I've read documentation and examples. I understand the basics and concepts, but haven't gotten anything to work. So I would appreciate some help with this total noob dilemma.

The ultimate goal is to schedule the execution of a django function every day. Before I get that far, I want to know that I can schedule any old script to run, first once, then on a regular basis.

So I want to:
1) Write a simple script (perhaps a bash script) that will allow me to determine that yes, it did indeed run successfully, or that it failed.
2) schedule this script to run at the top of the hour

I tried writing a bash script that simple output some text to the terminal:

#!/bin/bash
echo "The script ran"

Then I dropped this into a .txt file

MAILTO = *****.******@gmail.com
05 * * * * /home/vadmin/development/test.sh

But nothing happened. I'm sure I did many things wrong. Where do I start to fix all of this?

What makes you think it did not work? Not getting a mail?
That part is not correct, but you know cron logs its activity, did you look at the cron logs?

---------- Post updated at 17:52 ---------- Previous update was at 17:48 ----------

Why dont you try something like:

Code:

# log kernel diagnostic messages every 10 minutes
05,15,25,35,45,55 * * * * /usr/sbin/dmesg - >>/var/adm/messages 2>&1

Thanks, for the response. I didn't think it ran because there was no output, and no e-mail. Where/how do I access the logs?

What does your suggestion do? I tried it, but I couldn't find any output for that.

Tell us what OS you are using. For Linux, it's probably /var/log/cron for the logs. A script like:
#! /bin/bash
date >> /tmp/crontest.out
is what I would use to test cron. It appends a line to a file each time it runs. Your post implies that you just dropped some cron commands into some random file. You need to use the right file. Look at the man page for the crontab command. The crontab command changes the right file and also notifies the cron program to reread the file.

Sweet. Ok, I can confirm that it is working. I am on Linux and used /var/log/syslog.

Thanks for the help!