Problem with Cron

Question

Hi all,
I know cron has all but been replaced by launchd and periodic, but for various reasons I still need to use it, and it's not working for me.
I'm running 10.4.8 server, and Cron jobs won't run. I've got a file called 'root' located in /var/cron/tabs/ with ownership of root:wheel and permissions of 600. I'm trying to run the job every 15 minutes. Output of 'sudo crontab -u root -l' is:
*/15 * * * /path/to/my/command
If I copy and paste the command part of the line above into terminal, preceded by 'sudo ' the command runs fine, so I know the syntax is OK. But cron doesn't run the job, and the system.log and console.log are totally silent.
I've tried rebooting the server, and I've checked that the command is executable, but can't think of anything else.
Points promised to any solvers! TIA.
  Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Assuming that Camelot's suggestions all worked out, the most prevelant problem with cron jobs, in my experience, is that cron doesn't use the same environment as a user session. This usually shows up in differences in the PATH variable. Everyone, once in their life should set up a cron job to run a few minutes into the future to run:
/usr/bin/printenv > /Users/me/Desktop/printenv.txt
If you want to cut through it quicker:
echo $PATH
copy the output of that command and add a line to your script (assuming it's a bash script):
export PATH="<paste here>"
keep the quotes. See if that does it.
Roger