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I want to run a cron job every day at 8:10pm.

10 20 * * * curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.domain.com/blah.php

however, it doesn't work.

If I try to run it every minutes:


it works fine. What gives?

The command "date" yields the correct time on my server.

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Have you checked your log file? cron usually writes to /var/log/messages –  katriel Dec 19 '10 at 20:35
There is nothing regarding the cron job in messages.log –  Bastien Dec 19 '10 at 20:36
I found cron entries in syslog and realized the timestamp is off by 5 hours. I thought cron jobs went by the server time? –  Bastien Dec 19 '10 at 20:44

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

change UTC from yes to no in /etc/default/rcS. It works now.

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The above should be working just fine. Here's a list you can try:

  • Try a different time - e.g. set it to run 5 minutes after now and see if it works
  • Try a different user
    • Or a different crontab (/etc/crontab or another user's crontab)
  • Try a simpler command (e.g. echo works > /tmp/cron-works)
    • You can also just prepend the above to your curl (e.g. echo works > /tmp/curl-works; curl ...) or something along these lines
    • It's also good to add another cron entry at the same time which does echo and leave your curl in there as is
  • Check the logs - /var/log/syslog should show it executing the commands and possible failures
  • Confirm your curl actually ran - how do you know whether it ran? I assume you are looking at the logs for www.domain.com - if so, double-check the logs
  • Try special values such as @houry (see man 5 crontab for the complete list)

Also, how are you authenticating - if it's a network authentication, you may need to confirm this is working before any crontab executes.

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Thanks for your reply. I found out the date in my syslog is different than the date I get when I run "date". What gives? –  Bastien Dec 19 '10 at 20:48
@Bastien I see you found a solution yourself - tricky one, I might say... –  icyrock.com Dec 20 '10 at 1:07

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