Crontab: Why won't it execute script

Question

So in the past I just did a simple shutdown crontab, and that was it. Lately, I want to do something a bit more complex, so I'm trying to get it to run a script. Right now I've boiled it down to a super test script, called test.sh. This script just echoes something to the console and to a file.

However, no matter how many times I try, it doesn't seem to be working. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Console foo!!!"
echo "Foo!!!" > ~/foo22.txt

And here is my crontab:

08 18 * * * /home/craig/Documents/Scripts/test.sh

I've double and triple checked the path to the file, it's good. The script is executable, I can run it manually from the terminal and it executes.

I'm doing this in the root crontab, ie "sudo crontab -e", if that helps at all.

Answer 1

Applications run from cron have no "console". Both stdout and stderr are captured and emailed to the local user account when the job completes.

In your case the script is run as root, so the result will in in root's email. As for writing to the file, the ~ represents the root user's home directory, i.e. /root, so that is where you need to look for the output file.