've been puzzling over cronjobs for the last few hours. I've read documentation and examples. I understand the basics and concepts, but haven't gotten anything to work. So I would appreciate some help with this total noob dilemma. The ultimate goal is to schedule the execution of a django function every day. Before I get that far, I want to know that I can schedule any old script to run, first once, then on a regular basis. So I want to: 1) Write a simple script (perhaps a bash script) that will allow me to determine that yes, it did indeed run successfully, or that it failed. 2) schedule this script to run at the top of the hour I tried writing a bash script that simple output some text to the terminal: #!/bin/bash echo "The script ran" Then I dropped this into a .txt file MAILTO = *****.******@gmail.com 05 * * * * /home/vadmin/development/test.sh But nothing happened. I'm sure I did many things wrong. Where do I start to fix all of this?