I have an sh file called m.sh with the contents:

echo "Cleaning memory"

sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

echo ""

free -m



echo ""



ps cax | grep java > /dev/null

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

  echo "== Server is already running =="

else

  sh a.sh

  echo "========== STARTING THE SERVER =========="

fi

When I run it with sh m.sh it works perfectly. But I need it to run every 5 minutes, so I am using cron jobs. It needs to work as root/sudo so I did sudo -s, then crontab -e and wrote this in the file:

0,4,9,14,19,24,29,34,39,44,49,54 * * * * /bin/sh /home/<username>/m.sh

I had done some research, and I learned that the cron has different paths than the user, that is why I used those absolute paths, to make sure.

The cron job wasn't running the script every 5 minutes, as it was supposed to.

I also added

* * * * * /bin/echo "Testing123"

to test if cron was working at all, and nothing came up in the console.

How can I make the cron run the script every 5 minutes? I did research online, and tried the solutions, but couldn't make it to work for me. I did service cron start and it said it was already running. I also restarted the service. The permissions are set correctly, I gave all users read, write, and execute permissions just to make sure (I know the permissions are correct).