Impossible cron

cron crontab

[crxvfr]

I recently bought a link exchange script that uses crontab to check recip links. I've gone thru two servers and had the author of the script try to figure out why the cron job that checks the links doesn't work. Each wants to pass the blame. I paid $70 for the script and its the only thing thats preventing me from going live at this point. Anybody have any suggestions or tips for what I should do or for a similar program that works well and doesn't require a masters in rocket science to get working? Thanks

[2by4]

could be lots of things, you could be using the wrong application to run the cron job, you could have permission problems, you could have remote file access problems, you're almost for certain using the wrong host.

Some hosters allow some of these issues to be worked around, some don't. If you want to pay basically nothing for a script you can't expect too much though, and then if you don't want to pay someone to fix your problems for you, you also can't expect too much. Cron stuff can be tricky.

[rocknbil]

crx: do you have access to error logs?

Cron jobs are no more complex than running the script via command line, in fact that's all they do (in this case, a cron'ed SCRIPT.)

If you have it cron'ed to run at a certain time, all you have to do is grep your logs for that time and see what error the script is returning.

IMO a "link checker" or any other script written to run via cron or command line should have a web-based option or logging scheme in place to follow up to make sure it's working correctly, are there any in place for this script?