If the shown line is your crontab entry, there must be an additional script root involved, which might be (yet another) cause for the script behaving weird.

You would be right if you were talking about normal Unix cron. Unfortunally, Linux distros truely enjoy deviating from decades of established pratices, especially if they can introduce another maze of little /etc files.

For decades, cron used files in /var/spool/crontab, one for each user. It was clear, it was simple, everyone understood it, and life was good. But, no, simplicity isn't good enough for your standard Linux distro. Good heavens someone might want to use a simple grep to find out when a certain program is run from cron (and by who). No, we can't have that! Nowadays, we must have next to the cron spool directory, a /etc/cron.hourly/, a /etc/cron.daily/, a /etc/cron.weekly/, a /etc/cront.monthy/, a /etc/crontab, and to top it off, a /etc/cron.d/. With different syntax than the files in crontab spool directory. An extra column is introduced to indicate which uid to run under.

Why a good and honost spool directory isn't good enough remains a mystery.

Abigail

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