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I added a cron job recently, but made a mistake in the path while giving the command and hence, the job never succeeded. Is there some way to test the cron changes we have done?

Please note that I had indeed copied and pasted the command from my command line and it was just an stray keypress that caused this.

Answers

This question has also been asked on serverfault and has garnered a couple additional answers

The following is a paraphrased version of Marco's solution: (Not sure if best etiquette is not providing a link only answer or not copying someone else's solution)

Create a environment file with a temporary cron entry

* * * * *  /usr/bin/env > /home/username/cron-env

Then create a shell script called run-as-cron which executes the command using that environment.

#!/bin/sh

. "$1"
exec /usr/bin/env -i "$SHELL" -c ". $1; $2"

Give it execute permission

chmod +x run-as-cron

and then it is then used like this:

./run-as-cron <cron-environment> <command>

e.g.

./run-as-cron /home/username/cron-env 'echo $PATH'