<p>You can trace this problem. Look in /var/log/cron and see if there are errors. If there are none, you may not be running cron with adequate logging. Look in your startup scripts for where crond starts. I'm not totally familiar with Fedora, but go to /etc/rc3.d or /etc/init.d and "grep crond *" and find which script starts crond. They use -lnn for the loglevel. I use -l10 for a lot of logs because I want to know what the problems are. Change it so it starts with a higher number like 10.</p>
<p>Cron problems usually revolve around the shell. When crond triggers an action, it starts without your normal shell. If you are relying on a PATH or other environment variables, they are not going to be available. You need to hard code the location of executables. Like, instead of</p>
<pre><code>10 4 * * * my_script
</code></pre>
<p>You need to explicitly state where it is, like this:</p>
<pre><code>10 4 * * * /home/brian/bin/my_script
</code></pre>
<p>Some environment variables are available to you, like $HOME.</p>
<p>If you want to see what is available, set up a cron job like this:</p>
<pre><code>10 4 * * * set > $HOME/cron_set.txt
</code></pre>
<p>so that it goes off in the next minute or two, then look in the output file and see what environment variables are available to you.</p>
