Crontab is not working on Amazon EC2 server

Question

Crontab is not working on Amazon EC2 Linux Server.

I have saved below codes in /etc/crontab file

crontab
# For details see man 4 crontabs 
# Example of job definition: 
# .---------------- minute (0 - 59) 
# | .------------- hour (0 - 23) 
# | | .---------- day of month (1 - 31) 
# | | | .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ... 
# | | | | .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat 
# | | | | | 
# * * * * * user-name command to be executed 
* 10 * * * tar cvfpz /home/backup/web_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /home/web

I have started crontab command already, but this one didn't work.

I also have saved this line in "crontab -e" too, but cron won't work.

* 10 * * * tar cvfpz /home/backup/web_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /home/web

Is there anyone who had same experience like me?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Solved the problem.

I used this code and it works!

* 2 * * * root tar cvfpz /home/backup/web_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.tar.gz /home/web

Answer 2

I recently began using Amazon's linux distro on ec2 instances and after trying all kinds of things for cron all I needed was:
sudo service crond start
crontab -e
This allowed me to set a cron job as "ec2-user" without specifying the user. For example:
0 12 * * * python3 example.py
In fact, specifying a user here prevented it from running.

Answer 3

You should use crontab -e to create cron for the logged user, so that you don't need to inform the username. See here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16986464/1777152

Answer 4

不要使用nano ，使用本机sudo crontab -e命令。

Answer 5

For people who are dealing with AWS machines and EBS you need to specify the root keyword before the command since ec2-user isn't allowed to run crontabs. Of course there's a way to fix that.

you can edit the crontab by typing sudo nano /etc/cron.d/mycrontabs or crontab -e

* * * * * root bla bla

• Also make sure e that the file is ended with a new line