title: crontab not working in AWS EC2 instance
body: <p>I am struggling to get crontabs in my AWS EC2 instance (Amazon Linux AMI) to run an R script of mine, so I wrote a very basic cronjob simply to test if crontabs are working in my instance at all:</p>
  
  <pre><code>crontab -e
  
  * * * * * echo "Is this working" 
  * * * * * echo "write to script" &gt;&gt; testfile.txt
  
  save the crontab
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>however neither of these did anything (no output in terminal from the job running / no new textfile written in my home directory)...</p>
  
  <p>how to I get crontabs to work in my AWS EC2 instance?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I tried to run the following in the command line, which didnt work...</p>
  
  <pre><code>sudo service cron start
  cron: unrecognized service
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>EDIT2: I also get the following </p>
  
  <pre><code>ps aux | grep crond
  root      2694  0.0  0.0 121604  2580 ?        Ss   Jan10   0:00 crond
  root      5491  0.0  0.0 110472  2044 pts/0    S+   00:52   0:00 grep --color=auto crond
  </code></pre>