Troubleshoot and Check Cron Job Logs
cron is very useful tool and mechanism to schedule jobs in Linux operating system. cron can run scripts, commands, binaries if set properly. But in some cases there may be some mis-configuration or unexpected behavior. So we may not be sure whether cron runs like we want. We can check cron log in order to get more detail about job. By the way more details about cron can be learned from following tutorials.
Linux Crontab Syntax and Examples
Linux Crontab Tutorial with Examples To Schedule Jobs
Cron Log Path
cronlogs are stored in a general log file named syslog . This file can be found most of the popular distributions like CentOS, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu. syslog file is located regular log directory /var/log/syslog .
1 | $ cat /var/log/syslog |
Check Cron Log Lines
As we can see in previous example there are a lot of log lines which is produced by different Linux component. But we need to find cron logs. There is a to filter and check only cron log lines. Every cron log line contains string CRON. So we will filter lines containing CRON with grep command like below.
1 | $ grep CRON /var/log/syslog |
As we can see log lines provides following information.
Dateprovides when the log is createdhostnameprovides the hostname of the systemrootthe user account which is used to run cron jobCMDwhat type of thing is try to run which is command in this case- and the last part provides the command tried to run
Follow Cron Logs In Real Time
If we want to read the cron job logs in real time we can use tail command with -f option. This will read the log file and print to the screen. But before printing we will filter only CRON lines with grep command like below.
1 | $ tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep CRON |
