What happens when cron job fails?
If your cronjob fails you will receive a mail stating the reason of failure. This is one of the best way to detect the error in setting a cron job. According to this answer one can get errors of a cronjob in a log file using redirection.
Why is my cron not working?
The first and foremost one is that your Cron daemon might not be working for some reason which will consequently cause your Crontab to fail. The environment variables of your system might not have been properly set up. There can be some errors in the script that you are trying to execute with your Crontab.
How do I know if cron is running RedHat?
To check to see if the cron daemon is running, search the running processes with the ps command. The cron daemon’s command will show up in the output as crond. The entry in this output for grep crond can be ignored but the other entry for crond can be seen running as root. This shows that the cron daemon is running.
Why are my crontab scripts not being executed?
Often, crontab scripts are not executed on schedule or as expected. There are numerous reasons for that: This community wiki aims to aggregate the top reasons for crontab scripts not being executed as expected. Write each reason in a separate answer.
Why does CRON not work when executed from shell?
This is especially tricky, because the same command will work when executed from shell. The reason is that cron does not have the same PATH environment variable as the user. If your crontab command has a % symbol in it, cron tries to interpret it.
Why is cron job not running with same user?
The cron job doesn’t run with the same user with which you are executing the script manually – so it doesn’t have access to the same $PATH variable as your user which means it can’t locate the Java executable to execute the commands in the script. We should first fetch the value of PATH variable as below and then set it (export) in the script –
Why does Cron fail when my Password is expired?
Cron is calling a script that is not executable. By running chmod +x /path/to/script, the script becomes executable and this should resolve this issue. It is also possible that the user’s password has expired. Even root’s password can expire. You can tail -f /var/log/cron.log and you will see cron fail with password expired.