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Is there a command that can be run to verify that a users cron job has run successfully?

Platform is Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

I have scripts in /home/useraccount/bin/


crontab -l

while logged in as user results in:

# m h  dom mon dow   command

@hourly /home/useraccount/bin/script_1

@hourly /home/locateruser/bin/script_2

I realize scripts could send email or write to a log with a timestamp, but wondering if there is just a way to verify it ran from the command line.


I ran

ps -ef|grep cron 

... and it shows

root      4358     1  0 Mar12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/cron

Not sure if this indicates it is running the jobs though....

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i think cron is always running. but if your cron jobs starts another process, then ps can be used to test whether said new process is running –  gr33d Mar 30 '10 at 14:44
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4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted
grep scriptname /var/log/syslog
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Thanks , this works. –  CaseyIT Mar 30 '10 at 15:04
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you can check to if its currently running with:

ps aux
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You can also have results emailed to you.

30 3 * * * find /home/*/Maildir/.Spam/{new,cur}/ -type f -mtime +6 -delete| \
           mail -e -s "task #1 report" postmaster@example.com
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To make sure a script completed successfully one should really use a temp file. Create it when the job starts and delete it when it finished. This also catches crashes and avoids running the same job again in case of errors.


# check if there is already a temp file with suffix .myscript in /tmp,
# if file exists return with status of 666
[ -f /tmp/*.bla ] && exit 666

# create a temp file with suffix .myscript
TEMP_FILE=`mktemp --suffix .myscript`
touch $TEMP_FILE

# script stuff

# we are done, clean-up after ourselves
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This is good practice –  Henry the Hengineer Sep 11 '12 at 22:48
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