We all write crontab jobs. I tend to write really complicated ones, where each line in the crontab has multiple statements, for loops and while loops. Which makes it moderately hard to figure out if it’s working.
So I created a simple little test script that reads the crontab, and then runs each line of the crontab separately, showing you what happens inside. Could you have written this yourself in less time that it took you to google for and find this post? Sure. But sometimes it’s too early in the morning, the coffee maker is broken, and you want to just grab a working script.
#!/bin/bash # $Id: crontab-test.sh 2771 2010-05-28 18:33:22Z bdobyns $ idx=0 #m h d m w cmd if [ -z "$1" ] ; then echo "usage: $0 [crontabname]" exit else cat "$1" | grep -v '^#' | grep -v ^MAILTO | while read m d h m w cmd do F=/tmp/$0.$$.$idx echo -n $cmd >$F if [ -s $F ] ; then bash -ex $F fi idx=$[ $idx + 1 ] done fi rm -rf /tmp/$0.*
