How to log cron jobs?

Question

I want to know how I can see exactly what the cron jobs are doing on each execution. Where are the log files located? Or can I send the output to my email? I have set the email address to send the log when the cron job runs but I haven't received anything yet.

Answer 1

On Ubuntu you can enable a cron.log file to contain just the CRON entries.

Uncomment the line that mentions cron in /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf file:

#  Default rules for rsyslog.
#

#                       For more information see rsyslog.conf(5) and /etc/rsyslog.conf

#
# First some standard log files.  Log by facility.
#
auth,authpriv.*                 /var/log/auth.log
*.*;auth,authpriv.none          -/var/log/syslog
#cron.*                          /var/log/cron.log

Save and close the file and then restart the rsyslog service:

sudo systemctl restart rsyslog

You can now see cron log entries in its own file:

sudo tail -f /var/log/cron.log

Sample outputs:

Jul 18 07:05:01 machine-host-name CRON[13638]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)

However, you will not see more information about what scripts were actually run inside /etc/cron.daily or /etc/cron.hourly, unless those scripts direct output to the cron.log (or perhaps to some other log file).

If you want to verify if a crontab is running and not have to search for it in cron.log or syslog, create a crontab that redirects output to a log file of your choice - something like:

# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
30 2 * * 1 /usr/local/sbin/certbot-auto renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log 2>&1

Steps taken from: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-cron-log-file-to-log-crontab-logs-in-ubuntu-linux/