How can I view results of my cron jobs?
I see so many guides on how to run crontab, but what I need right now is to learn how to
- Find log files about cron jobs
- Configure what gets logged
Solution 1:
Check if the programs you run with cron have their own log files. If if they don't but write their output to the standard outputs you can redirect these to files or mail them to you. Inside crontabs standard shell redirection works.
E.g. to redirect the error output of some_job.sh to some_job.err and discarding the standard output (i.e. sending it to /dev/null) add the following redirection to your crontab
33 3 * * * /path/to/some_job.sh 1> /dev/null 2> /other/path/to/some_job.err
or to mail it to you instead (if mail is available)
33 3 * * * /path/to/some_job.sh 1> /dev/null 2>&1 | mail -s "cron output" [email protected]
Solution 2:
Most cron daemons on platforms I've worked with automatically email the stdout/stderr of user cron jobs to the user whose crontab the job came from. I forget what happens to system-wide (non-user-specific cron jobs from /etc/crontab). The thing is people don't always set up a mailer daemon (that is, a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like sendmail, qmail, or postfix) on most Unix-like OSes anymore. So the cron job output emails just die in a local mail spool folder somewhere if they even get that far. So one answer might just be to fire up your mailer daemon, and maybe make sure you have a ~/.forward file to forward your local mail along to your "real" email account.
If you want your jobs to write to specific log files, you can use standard output redirection like @honk suggested, or, supposing your cron job is a shell script, you could have your script call logger(1) or syslog(1) or whatever other command-line tool your OS provides for sending arbitrary messages to syslog. Then you could use your OS's built-in methods for configuring which kinds of messages get logged where, perhaps by editing /etc/syslog.conf.
Most of my cron jobs invoke bash scripts I wrote specifically for the purpose of being started by cron for a particular reason. In those, especially when I'm initially writing and debugging them, I like to use bash's "set -vx" to make the unexpanded and expanded form of each line of the shell script get written to stdout before it gets executed. Note that shell scripts started from cron are considered non-login, non-interactive shells, so your standard shell startup scripts like .bashrc and .profile aren't run. If you use bash and want bash to run a startup script, you have to define an environment variable "BASH_ENV=/path/to/my/startup/script" in your crontab before the line where you define the job.
Solution 3:
The tasks cron is executing are responsible for their own logging.
Solution 4:
I think redirecting within the cron-file might not be the best option in this case.
Often you want the logging speification co-located with the cron job script. In this case, I suggest the following:
#!/bin/bash
exec &>> capture-log.txt
echo "Running cron-job foo at $(date)"
...
<rest of script>
This appends the output from the cron job to the capture-log.txt file.