crontab not running at specific time, but runs every min

Question

I want to run a cron job every day at 8:10pm.

10 20 * * * curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.example.com/blah.php

However, it doesn't work.

If I try to run it every minutes:

* * * * * curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.example.com/blah.php

It works fine. What gives?

The command "date" yields the correct time on my server.

Solution 1

change UTC from yes to no in /etc/default/rcS. It works now.

Solution 2

The above should be working just fine. Here's a list you can try:

• Try a different time - e.g. set it to run 5 minutes after now and see if it works
• Try a different user
  • Or a different crontab (/etc/crontab or another user's crontab)
• Try a simpler command (e.g. echo works > /tmp/cron-works)
  • You can also just prepend the above to your curl (e.g. echo works > /tmp/curl-works; curl ...) or something along these lines
  • It's also good to add another cron entry at the same time which does echo and leave your curl in there as is
• Check the logs - /var/log/syslog should show it executing the commands and possible failures
• Confirm your curl actually ran - how do you know whether it ran? I assume you are looking at the logs for www.example.com - if so, double-check the logs
• Try special values such as @houry (see man 5 crontab for the complete list)

Also, how are you authenticating - if it's a network authentication, you may need to confirm this is working before any crontab executes.

Solution 3

This answer helped me with the same situation. Restarting the cron service helped my server's cron service recognize the changes I made to the system's date.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34626135/crontab-linux-not-running-at-specific-time

sudo service rsyslog restart
sudo service cron restart or sudo service crond restart

Comments

[katriel]

Have you checked your log file? cron usually writes to /var/log/messages

[Bastien]

I found cron entries in syslog and realized the timestamp is off by 5 hours. I thought cron jobs went by the server time?

[Bastien]

Thanks for your reply. I found out the date in my syslog is different than the date I get when I run "date". What gives?

[icyrock.com]

@Bastien I see you found a solution yourself - tricky one, I might say...

[womble]

Can you expand on why this will solve the problem described?