Cron is running & executing jobs, but won't output to a .log file

Question

I realise that there are plenty of cron questions on the site and I've spent the last hour searching for a solution but haven't been able to find one. Essentially the cron job does execute, but it doesn't seem to execute or at least output the output to a file that I specify.

I can see that cron is running:

josh@lin-ldn-cen:~$ pgrep cron
734

The cron job executes successfully, as seen in my /var/log/cron file:

Sep 26 08:34:01 lin-ldn-cen CROND[82848]: (josh) CMD (/home/josh/test_script.sh > /home/josh/cron_logs/test.log)

I've used absolute paths as well as setting the PATH in my crontab file. I've included a newline at the end of my crontab file:

josh@lin-ldn-cen:~$ crontab -l
SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

0 */6 * * * /home/josh/youtube-downloads/download_djdj.sh > /home/josh/cron_logs/cron_download_djdj.log
*/5 * * * * /home/josh/youtube-downloads/download_djdj.sh 2>&1 /home/josh/cron_logs/cron_download_djdj.log
* * * * * /home/josh/test_script.sh > /home/josh/cron_logs/test.log

(Having the path at the top hasn't made any difference at all to the execution of my script)

test_script.sh is incredibly simple, and I used absolute paths there too - here it is:

josh@lin-ldn-cen:~$ cat test_script.sh
#!/bin/bash/

/usr/bin/echo Hello world

I've also tried several other things - including a . before my script in the crontab file, using 2>&1 to output errors, double checked paths, double checked that the .sh file is executable with chmod +x test_script.sh, included both sh and bash before the command in my crontab file - none of this seems to work. All I'm expecting from this is to see 'Hello world' in /home/josh/cron_logs/test.log.

Answer 1

I've since realised that the .sh file was executing - it was just the output that was not executing.

I fixed this issue by adding SHELL=/usr/bin/bash to the top of my crontab, and by changing the relevant line to use &>> to output to a log file:

* * * * * /home/josh/test_script.sh &>> /home/josh/cron_logs/test.log

Credit to this answer - I found it after I realised that the problem was isolated to the output to file segment of my command.