Cron jobs that work by hand but not on schedule

Back to list2024-09-29
You

The script runs fine in my shell and does nothing from cron.

ChatGPT

Cron runs with a minimal environment and no profile. Use absolute paths, set PATH at the top of the crontab, and redirect output to a file so the failure has somewhere to appear. Nine times in ten the missing piece is one of those three.

You

What is the most common way people get this wrong?

ChatGPT

Doing it once and never verifying. The setup is the visible part, so it gets attention, and the check that would catch a silent failure never gets written.