Check When Cron Jobs Last Ran

thanksajdotcom

Is there a way to check when the last time a cron job ran was? I have some scripts setup hourly and some daily and I just want to see if they are running or not. Pretty sure they are but just curious.

Thanks,
A.J.

scottalanmiller

By default it would be in your syslog. You can add something to the crontab to alert you as well.

scottalanmiller

No Apple, syslog != Stalin.

thanksajdotcom

@scottalanmiller said:

By default it would be in your syslog. You can add something to the crontab to alert you as well.

Where and how would I check this?

scottalanmiller

RHEL / CentOS:

grep cron /var/log/messages

thanksajdotcom

@scottalanmiller said:

RHEL / CentOS:
grep cron /var/log/messages

Yeah, no /var/log/messages in Ubuntu? Any idea of their equivalent?

scottalanmiller

Ubuntu is Debian so it uses /var/log/syslog

You should be using this all of the time. This is where all of your system messages are going.

thanksajdotcom

I found a thread on the Ubuntu forums here: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1845962

It pointed me to a conf file located here: /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf

I used vi to uncomment this line:

cron.*                       /var/log/cron.log

Now I should get cron logs. I'll check the other place too. Thanks!