Question

I have a cron job on an Ubuntu 10.4 server that stopped running for no apparent reason. (The job ran for months and has not been changed.) I am not a *nix guru so I plead ignorance if this is a simple problem. I can’t find any reason or indication why this job would have stopped. I’ve restarted the server without success. Here’s the job:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 * * * * java -jar /home/mydir/myjar.jar >>/home/mydir/crontaboutput.txt

The last line in the output file shows that the program ran on 8/29/2012. Nothing after that.

Any ideas where to look?

Answer 1

There should be something in your system log when the job was run. The other thing you could >try is to add 2>&1 to the job to see any errors in your text file. – Lars Kotthoff yesterday

This proved to be the key piece of information – adding 2>&1 allowed me to capture an error that wasn’t getting reported anywhere else. The completed command line then looked like:

java -jar /home/mydir/myjar.jar  2>&1  >>/home/mydir/crontaboutput.txt