Crontab never executes in Windows Subsystem Linux

Question

I set up some cronjobs a while back using crontab -e. My crontab includes the following line:

* * * * * /usr/bin/touch /home/blah/MADEBYCRON

It's been weeks since I did this. I have never seen /home/blah/MADEBYCRON. I set permissions on my home directory so it should be able to create files in this directory, so why does this file never exist?

/var/log/syslog does not exist.

Answer 1

Ensure that the cron service is running. I use WSL with cron every day for my local backups using rsync so this should work.

Use which cron to check its installed, mine says /usr/sbin/cron.

Use crontab -l to list your configured jobs.

Use ps aux | grep cron to look see if cron is running, you should see /usr/sbin/cron if it is.

Use service cron status to check if the service is started.

Use sudo service cron start to start the cron service if it is not running.