Running a crontab job from locally stored script - amazon-s3

Question

Having trouble running a crontab psql backup job from a locally stored script. I added the job via crontab -e and when I used crontab -l, it shows up in the list of jobs. The script that it is supposed to run works fine, checked that, runs as it should and dumps the output on the designated s3 bucket when using ./backup.sh
This is what I set the job as:
59 23 * * 7 /Users/myusername/backup.sh
The job should run at 11:59PM every Sunday, but it doesn't. I can't figure out what the issue is (do I need to leave line breaks/spaces in between each job, or just after the very lost job in my crontab list?
Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Depending on your distribution, you might want to check logs for Cron service.
Non-exhaustive list of possible problem reasons:
Cron service is not running at all and hence is not starting any of the tasks;
Usually Cron passes your script a very limited set of environment variables, so your script might fail because of some missing environment. That will probably be reflected in cron daemon logs
What can you do
Cron service: if your distro uses systemd then try running systemctl status cron (or systemctl status crond?) to check if it is running.
Your script is started but fails: here are several things to try.
Try checking cron service logs, maybe with something like journalctl --unit cron or journalctl -f before the script should be started;
Check if there is a dead.letter file in your home directory containing output of the failed script. When Cron starts your script and the script outputs something (which is considered a problem), that output is mailed to you. If mailing is not properly configured then it usually goes to that file.
Put something like this in the beginning of your script:
(
date
id -a
set
echo
) >> /tmp/myscript.log
Then wait until cron runs your script and check if the file /tmp/myscript.log was created. Then try to run your script manually, replicating all the environment created by cron which you now know. I.e. unset all but the variables Cron leaves, and make sure id is correct.