???? how to launch bash script in cron ????

Question

with help from people in this forum, I successfully debugged the syntax in a shell script I wrote (my syntactical faux pas had to do with sending a multi-line mail message from a bash script).
I can manually launch my script from Terminal's command line, and it works perfectly (well, at least it does exactly what I told it to do:). I try to launch it via cron, and it doesn't appear to ever launch.
In /var/cron/tabs/root, the pertinent line of text reads:
00 22 * * * /usr/local/customShellScripts/script.sh
so it is supposed to launch daily at 10PM.
Other jobs listed in /var/cron/tabs/root do run, because I get emails to my postfix admin account saying that they do. However, none of those other jobs are shell scripts; they are stuff like:
24 06 * * 5 /usr/sbin/diskutil verifyVolume /
The directory listing for /var/cron/tabs/root reads:
$ ls /var/cron/tabs
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 25 18:53:28 2006 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 17:13:47 2005 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1040 Mar 31 20:28:10 2006 root
The directory listing for script.sh reads:
$ ls /usr/local/customShellScripts/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Mar 31 18:31:27 2006 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root wheel 374 Mar 5 12:26:23 2006 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 6148 Feb 4 14:13:22 2006 .DS_Store
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8058 Mar 31 20:27:50 2006 script.sh
for debug, the first two lines of script.sh read:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/touch /foo
but the file /foo never gets created. I tried using just "touch /foo" and that didn't work either.
Also, since the script has a lot of calls to "echo," "expr," "date," "cut," "awk," etc., if I ever get cron to execute the script past the shebang line, do I have to preface all those calls with their full path? Or can I do something like in the old /etc/crontab file, where they defined a path variable up front
PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
and the script will be smart enough to look in those directories for the appropriate executables?
But, getting back to the first problem, I am obviously overlooking something very basic, which is not surprising since I'm self-taught (and I guess, Apple Unix Discussions forum taught) at this unix thing and shell scripting. So, can anybody bail me out here...again?
2001 Quicksilver G4   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

Answer 1

Hey Reese
You bailed me out, dude! Apparently, my difficulties stemmed from me trying to directly edit /var/cron/tabs/root with pico. Never seemed to bother the other stuff, but it did this time. I am totally inept with vi, the default editor for crontab -e, which is why I had cheated before, and directly edited the /var/cron/tabs/root, el.al., so I had to find out how to
export EDITOR='pico'
in my .bashrc
After having done that, no problem, except for a latent programming logic bug that has reared its ugly head (my script is doing some date manipulation with today's and yesterday's date, and my script crashed and burned on the month change and with stuff related to single-digit date sequence numbers <10).
But, hey, I learned how to reset my default editor, so as to make life easier for me when it comes time to dorking with crontab files, and I learned that when the crontab file says "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall," it means it!
Thanx for the troubleshooting hint.