Daily cron job does not seem to work

Question

I have a cron job supposed to trigger a shell script daily at 2 AM.

0 2 * * * /root/bin/script.sh

However it does not work at all. What am I missing?

More details: The script runs fine without cron scheduling when run manually and does what it is supposed to do. Root user is running the cron job. The cron job was scheduled by crontab -e as root user. pgrep cron gives a service id which means that cron service is running. Following are the contents of /root/bin/script.sh file:

BACKUP_LOG=/var/log/backup.log
exec 1> >(while IFS= read -r line; do echo "$(date --rfc-3339 ns) $line"; done | tee -a ${BACKUP_LOG}) 2>&1

# Back up the etc directory
mkdir /home/directory1/backup/etc_backup
cp -Lrp /etc /home/data/backup/etc_backup
tar czf /home/data/backup/etc_backup.tgz
/home/data/backup/etc_backup
rm -rf /home/data/backup/etc_backup

Actually I moved the script from /etc/cron.daily/ to /root/bin. Is the script supposed to be in /etc/cron.daily only for daily execution?

Answer 1

My guess is that your script isn't being understood properly by the shell, because it doesn't have any proper shebang. Try using crontab -e with this instead:

0 2 * * * bash /root/bin/script.sh > /tmp/crontest.log 2>&1

By invoking the script directly using bash, the script should run fine now. Any output should end up logged to /tmp/crontest.log as well, which could help a bit with debugging if it still doesn't work.