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cron
Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 9 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Cron jobs fail silently with no logs to diagnoseUnreviewed
20102026- Cron jobs fail silently with no logs, hard to diagnose why they stop2026-06-02
- No way to force-run or diagnose cron jobs when they fail2025-03-15
- Mistakes in crontab commands fail silently with no error trace, hours of debugging2013-03-16
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 13 complaints
- Cron's 5-field syntax is ambiguous and hard to read without knowing the variant2026-06-06
- Default PATH missing expected directories and hard to adjust per script2026-06-03
- Cron jobs fail silently with no logs, hard to diagnose why they stop2026-06-02
- No way to force-run or diagnose cron jobs when they fail2025-03-15
- Hard to manually run jobs to check they actually work2024-11-04
- Scheduled task config is scattered across many locations, hard to locate2024-09-18
- Editing the cron text file is hard for the people who manage jobs2018-08-21
- Error reports go to email, forcing users into mail clients or fragile mail routing rules2015-11-12
- Mistakes in crontab commands fail silently with no error trace, hours of debugging2013-03-16
- Silently ignores bad entries, so mistakes give no error and are hard to notice2011-06-28
- Cron gives no errors, so failing scripts are hard to debug2011-06-27
- Gotcha takes forever to find the cause of the problem2011-06-27
- No way to test-run cron entries, so developers must wait for scheduled runs2010-05-25