Crontab is not working

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

Dear Friends,

I have Red Hat Linux Enterprise version 6.3. running SAP and oracle.
I have created one crontab for user orasid to execute one job periodically.
But it is not executing. I have checked crontab service is running.

Please help in the matter.

Regards,
Bhagawati Pandey

2

Have you looked in your mails, cron logs to see if you find anything?
And without seeing your crontab line and the job you are trying to run, we cant help more than that, perhaps you can start by looking if that user is granted the right to use cron...

3

Also be sure that the cronjob is registred/entered either as 'Oracle', 'SAP' or 'root' user.
Depending for which environment (not related to env-variables) the job is.

Also, how do the job (what you have entered as cronjob) look like?
Furthermore, be aware that the cronjob does not have env variables.

hth

4

another tip...

ensure in the script that you use the full path to the command:

/usr/bin/bash

instead of

bash

this is to account for any variation in the path statement between your user and the cron user.

5

I would vote that your user doesn't have crontab rights. Since I don't usually have root on a server
I usually create a test job and check for the results. Something that doesn't need anything else to run,
but provides proof that it ran. Something like this:

$ crontab -l
* * * * * `date > /tmp/mydate.dat` > /dev/null 2>&1
$ ls -l /tmp/mydate.dat
ls: cannot access /tmp/mydate.dat: No such file or directory
...
$ ls -l /tmp/mydate.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 oracle dba 29 Sep 16 14:12 /tmp/mydate.dat
$  cat /tmp/mydate.dat
Wed Sep 16 14:12:01 EDT 2015

This way you know that crontab works. Otherwise you need someone with root to look at the system logs
to see if your crontab is getting an error.

6

Can I check that you created the entry using crontab -e from the appropriate user account? If not, then the cron service will not know about it. It reads the crontab files at start and when notified that one has changed, signalled by leaving crontab -e

What do you see in the cron log file, usually /var/log/cron or similar.

Robin