Is cron running?

Question

Is there an easy way to tell if cron is actually running? I'm not talking about whether my crontab entries are valid, but is cron actually attempting to execute those entries?

I'm on Ubuntu 14

Answer 1

On Ubuntu 14.04 (which uses upstart) you can check the service status using service cron status:

$ service cron status
cron start/running, process 1414

The systemd equivalent (applicable for newer systems) is systemctl status cron.service

You could also examine the CRON entries in the system log, e.g. grep CRON /var/log/syslog

Answer 2

You can check the status of cron service or any service for that matter using

service service.name status

In case of cron

service cron status