Why your cron job isn't running: eight common causes and how to check each

A cron job that silently does nothing usually traces back to one of eight causes, the article explains. The first step is confirming the cron daemon is actually running, since minimal container images often lack it entirely. Failures are hard to spot because cron mails output to a local user that most servers never configure, so the article recommends redirecting each job's output to its own log file. Other frequent culprits include a shorter PATH than the interactive shell uses, shell-specific syntax breaking under /bin/sh, unescaped percent signs, mismatched crontab formats, non-executable scripts or Windows line endings, and a server time zone that differs from the user's. Each cause comes with a one-line test to confirm it.