Wow, that drove me crazy.

While having a command execute fine in the crontab, the script wasn’t. Here is what my crontab looked like.

$ crontab -l

* * * * * echo $(date) > somefile                 # this one was working
* * * * * /bin/bash /full/path/to/somescript.sh   # this one wouldn't

somescript.sh even contains a shebang, and it still didn’t work. Then I read this post and finally understood what was wrong by randomly visiting the home directory:

The script was executing all along, but putting the result in ~/.

From the beginning

I am working on WSL. You edit crontab by running

$ crontab -e

and start the daemon with

$ /etc/init.d/cron start

Putting the following in the crontab can help you with debugging

#Identify whats in the path variable in the context of your script
* * * * * echo $PATH >> ~/cron.log

#Identify the shell being used in your script
* * * * * echo $SHELL >> ~/cron.log

#Identify the working directory your cron job executes in by default (usually user home directory)
* * * * * echo $(pwd) >> ~/cron.log