[SATLUG] Mysterious cron problem

[Sean Carolan]

> I don't believe cron knows where stdout is.  It will try to email to the
> user, but if that's not set up, the output will be lost.
>
> Try `echo "Hello world" >> /tmp/hello` and see if it works.

Thanks Daniel and Bruce.  To answer your questions:

I use crontab -e to edit the crontab entries.

Regarding the echo "Hello world" entry - it works fine as root, I
watched it show up in the /var/log/cron.log file:

May 16 10:07:01 gecko /USR/SBIN/CRON[22251]: (root) CMD (echo "Hello world!")

But the exact same crontab entry in my user's crontab does nothing,
even after restarting cron, etc.  I even tried adding it to
/etc/crontab instead just to see if it would work, but the same result
- works for root, not for user.