cron job verification

[Larry Cook]

> On my Debian boxes, cron jobs send me an email if and only if they have
> any output.  

Also on RedHat 8 and Solaris.  I would guess that is the standard behavior for 
all distros.

> You could try putting an "echo Starting job..." in
> someplace to see if you get something from that.  

If it's a script, I usually put "sh -x " in front to echo all the lines of the 
script.

> Also, I believe the
> mails are sent to root; I have an entry in /etc/aliases which actually
> sends it to my normal user account.

I think it is sent to the account that owns the crontab file, which would be 
the account you did the "crontab -e" from.  If I want email to go to a list of 
people I just pipe the output to mail.

Larry