Why isn't my cron job going?

Question

I was told that to get a cron job running hourly you simply have to put a shell script into /etc/cron.hourly

So I tried adding

#!/usr/bin/env sh
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Into a file test.sh and putting it into /etc/cron.hourly/ directory. Then I chown it to root and chmod +x on it. It does as expected if I execute it directly. But it doesn't execute automatically, hourly.. what am I missing?

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edit: I've changed the script to something simpler, just

#!/usr/bin/env sh
echo foo > ~/sandpit/bar.txt

Then I waited an hour , these are the last 4 lines at the end of my /var/log/syslog

Nov  1 18:45:01 wim-ubuntu ntpdate[1719]: adjust time server 91.189.94.4 offset -0.149832 sec
Nov  1 18:46:27 wim-ubuntu kernel: [  106.562460] exe (2058): /proc/2058/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/2058/oom_score_adj instead.
Nov  1 19:17:01 wim-ubuntu CRON[4204]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov  1 20:17:01 wim-ubuntu CRON[4793]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)

But my file isn't being created, so I guess my cron job still isn't going.

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edit2:

I removed the extensions, now I have the scripts actually found by cron. But they are failing for unknown reasons (details below)

wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ ll
total 28
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 2011-11-02 01:32 ./
drwxr-xr-x 150 root root 12288 2011-11-02 01:58 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   102 2011-09-20 10:04 .placeholder
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root    49 2011-11-01 19:00 test*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root    48 2011-11-01 19:23 test2*
wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ run-parts --test /etc/cron.hourly
/etc/cron.hourly/test
/etc/cron.hourly/test2
wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ date
Wed Nov  2 02:25:39 EST 2011
wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ cat test
#!/usr/bin/env sh
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wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ cat test2
#!/usr/bin/env sh
echo foo > ~/sandpit/bar.txt

wim@wim-ubuntu:/etc/cron.hourly$ tail -4 /var/log/syslog
Nov  2 02:01:33 wim-ubuntu AptDaemon: INFO: Quitting was requested
Nov  2 02:17:01 wim-ubuntu CRON[8249]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov  2 02:17:01 wim-ubuntu CRON[8248]: (CRON) error (grandchild #8249 failed with exit status 1)
Nov  2 02:17:01 wim-ubuntu CRON[8248]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

Answer 1

Some versions of cron don't run scripts with file name extensions so try renaming the script (eg: mv test.sh test).

You can probably check what cron will run using this test (it doesn't actually run the files):

run-parts --test /etc/cron.hourly

Answer 2

I'm still not sure why my jobs in /etc/cron.hourly don't run. But I was able to schedule them in an alternate way by adding them manually with the command crontab -e.