UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have installed the following crontab and nothing happens. Not even errors are writen to the specified file. What can be wrong?

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (crontab_file installed on Mon Apr 29 17:17:40 2002)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
#5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/java/jdk/bin/java -classpath ~/activation.jar:~/mail.jar:~/swsms.jar: Mail2Phone 2>>~/cronerrors.log
#5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * java -classpath ~/activation.jar:~/mail.jar:~/swsms.jar: Mail2Phone 2>>~/cronerrors.log
#* * * * * /usr/java/jdk/bin/java -classpath~/activation.jar:~/mail.jar:~/swsms.jar: Mail2Phone 2>>~/cronerrors&
5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/java/jdk/bin/java -classpath ~/activation.jar:~/mail.jar:~/swsms.jar:"$CLASSPATH" Mail2Phone 2>>~/cronerrors.log

I have tried the options that are commented too.
The mode of the cronerrors.log file is -rw-r--r--.

Check that the user (if it isn't root - you didn't mention that) is allowed to have a cron entry. On Solaris (you didn't mention what OS you use) it would be in /etc/cron.d/cron.allow (or .deny) - check both.

Make sure cron is running.
$ ps -ef|grep "cron"
root 194 1 0 Apr 05 ? 0:11 /usr/sbin/cron

Put an entry like the following to insure cron is working:
* * * * * date > /tmp/mydate.file

Check that the file is updated every minute.

Make sure your script/program/whatever works from an interactive shell first.

Give more details after doing these things if you can't find the answer.

This is a not so obvious question?

Did you install this file as the crontab default configuration file.

# crontab /path/to/cron/file

Are you permissions correct, 400?
Owner/Group?? are they root:sys?

Please forgive me if this is assuming that you don't know how to do this...

We are on digital unix. If you do not edit using crontab -e (ie you do vi filename) it corrupts your crontab. Even fixing permissons does not correct it. YOu need to re-edit with crontab -e and save to fix the problem.