Crontab entry is failing

Applies to:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Version N/A and later

Linux x86-64

Symptoms

A crontab entry looks like this, it can refer to any command, in this example, the “tar” command is used to backup a home directory via cron. In reality, the cron entry could be anything.

20 18 * * * tar -cjf user-home.tar.bz2 backup-dir

There is nothing logged to determine why the command is failing.

Cause

The command is failing because “cron” cannot find the PATH for the command that is run from cron, in this case it is the “tar” command, it could be any command.

Solution