How to Manually Run Cron Tasks

To manually run cron tasks you can use the run-parts command in Linux.

So to run your cron-weekly, for example, to test that a fix you just made runs without error (this is what I just did, in fact)

run-parts /etc/cron-weekly

run-parts will run all the executables in a directory (you must point at the directory). So if you have several files in cron-weekly to run, you can’t just point to one of the files.

You may run into environmental differences running the script as a different user than the cron test runs at, so you can run as that user if needed. You need to be aware this is a quick and simple way of testing part of the process but it doesn’t do a perfect job of testing if it works as a cron task. But it will let you catch some failures quickly and fix them in time for the actual cron task to run. So do check that the everything works after the real cron job runs.

This is just the kind of thing I said I would put in this blog. Simple stuff but things I forget – so I put it here to remember and maybe help out others, like me, that need really basic tips.

If you have a cron task item (or have setup the whole task this way) that is just a script and you just want to test that 1 item you may run the script directly. For example (for a Linux shell script):

sh /etc/cron.weekly/your_crontask_script.sh