Issue
I added a cron job recently, but made a mistake in the path while giving the command and hence, the job never succeeded. Is there some way to test the cron changes we have done?
Please note that I had indeed copied and pasted the command from my command line and it was just an stray keypress that caused this.
Solution
This question has also been asked on serverfault and has garnered a couple additional answers
The following is a paraphrased version of Marco's solution: (Not sure if best etiquette is not providing a link only answer or not copying someone else's solution)
Create a environment file with a temporary cron entry
* * * * * /usr/bin/env > /home/username/cron-env
Then create a shell script called run-as-cron
which executes the command using that environment.
#!/bin/sh
. "$1"
exec /usr/bin/env -i "$SHELL" -c ". $1; $2"
Give it execute permission
chmod +x run-as-cron
and then it is then used like this:
./run-as-cron <cron-environment> <command>
e.g.
./run-as-cron /home/username/cron-env 'echo $PATH'
Answered By - Joshua Answer Checked By - Senaida (WPSolving Volunteer)