Where do I look for cron errors

Question

I have 2 cron jobs that were running fine but now stopped running. I looked through my crontab and everything looks OK. How can I tell if these jobs are running? is there a place where cron stores errors? Where do I look for cron specific errors, or even a record of the cron jobs that ran prior.

by default every cron job sends email to that user check them with mail command — PKumar, Apr 01 '15 at 15:22
This posting has an extensive Q&A that explains how to watch cron.log in real time on-screen: https://askubuntu.com/questions/966194/16-04-how-do-i-make-cron-create-cron-log-and-monitor-it-in-real-time?noredirect=1&lq=1 — SDsolar, Oct 22 '17 at 06:41

Andrew Meyer · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-01T15:33:40.923

4

Try directing the output to a log file. Just make sure that it exists and is writable by whatever user the cronjob is running as. (In my example, this would be cyphertite)

I also recommend running date somewhere at the beginning of your script so that you get the date in the log file.

 0 15 * * *    /home/andrew/daily-backup.sh >> /var/log/cyphertite.log

Additionally, cron logs are directed to /var/log/syslog if that helps

edited Apr 01 '15 at 15:33

answered Apr 01 '15 at 15:23

Andrew Meyer

1,487

2

...and can be extracted via grep CRON /var/log/syslog – waltinator Apr 01 '15 at 15:47
I was looking for the location of the syslog – EastsideDev Apr 01 '15 at 21:01
Note that Ubuntu jammy for example has not a "/var/log/syslog" – Valerio Bozz Jun 15 '23 at 10:39

Where do I look for cron errors

1 Answers1