Test run cron entry

Question

I added a cron job recently, but made a mistake in the path while giving the command and hence, the job never succeeded. Is there some way to test the cron changes we have done?

Please note that I had indeed copied and pasted the command from my command line and it was just an stray keypress that caused this.

Answer 1

When I want to test my cron jobs I usually set the interval very low and monitor the logs closely. When I am convinced the entry is correct, I set the interval back to a sane value.

For example, run job every two minutes:

*/2 * * * * echo "Hello World"

And the I run tail -f on my log file (/var/log/syslogon debian).