On 2014.01.26 20:41, Steve Trapp wrote: > As for why something'd work for /etc/crontab and not for crontab -e > is most likely something needed to be *root* permission I was using a root shell (and adding 'touch /root/somefile' did indeed write the file). Looking at the manpage again, I see that su can confuse crontab (even su - apparently), so it was likely a problem with environment variables.