Two Cron jobs at the same time - one not working

Question

First of all I am not very familiar with cron... Under .../cron/crontabs I have a file (which is called root, not sure whether it needs to be the same as the user?) with one job:

* * * * * sleep 0; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
* * * * * sleep 10; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
* * * * * sleep 20; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
...

And this works: it downloads the contents of the IP address and saves into my file every 10 seconds. There are other three commands with sleep 30, 40 and 50.

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Now I want to add another job that executes a python script every 10 seconds.

I tried to create a new file under .../cron/crontabs, which I called job2 but nothing happened.

• can I just create as many cron scripts as I want? Do I need to start them somehow?

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Since this did not work, I tried to add my second job to the existing root file, which now reads:

* * * * * sleep 0; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
* * * * * /home/user/Documents/pythonscript
* * * * * sleep 10; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
* * * * * /home/user/Documents/pythonscript
* * * * * sleep 20; wget -0 /var/cache/file.txt 'IP-ADDRESS'
* * * * * /home/user/Documents/pythonscript
...

where pythonscript is an executable, and I made sure that the cron folder has permissions to the python script path...

• This still does not work. How do I make cron execture a python script?

Answer 1

Yes, you can have only one crontab per user, and its filename is the username.

Also, the proper way to edit it is to run crontab -e -- it's entirely possible that the cron daemon doesn't notice you've changed the file directly. Just call crontab -enow, it will open your editor with the crontab, and it will reload the config after you save and exit, and your other jobs should start running.