Cron Job Not Running on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS

I have created a Cron job to run a script that checks if a process is running, in case it does it just print that the process is running, if not it prints out the process is not running and restart the process:

#!/bin/sh

SERVICE="start_server.py"
if ps -ef | grep "$SERVICE" | grep -v grep >/dev/null
then
    echo "start_server.py is running"
else
    echo "start_server.py stopped"
    python2.7 start_server.py &
fi

As user Ubuntu I created the following cron job by running - crontab -e

* * * * * /home/ubuntu/mislaka/check_process.sh 2>&1 /home/ubuntu/mislaka/script_log.log

For some reason, it is not working or writing the output to the log file.

Tried restarting cron service, tried creating the cron job as root, changed all the permission and the user who is running the script yet nothing is working.

The script if I run it by itself works as expected.

Ubuntu Version:

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release:        20.04
Codename:       focal

Thanks in advance

Jobs run through cron, or systemd startup scripts aren't run in the same runtime environment that you have on your desktop. systemd startup scripts are run as root. None of your PATH changes, or other environment variable settings are automatically propagated to your cron job. For example, there's no $DISPLAY, so GUI programs need special treatment (read man xhost).

One can set environment variables for all one's cron jobs in the crontab file Read man 5 crontab.

Look at the results of echo "=== id ===";id;echo "=== set ===";set;echo "=== env ===";env | sort;echo "=== alias ===";alias in each of your environments.

Since the command part of the crontab line is, by default, interpreted by /bin/sh, which has a simpler syntax than /bin/bash, I recommend having command be a call to a bash script (executable, mounted, starts with #!/bin/bash) which sets up the environment, then calls the desired program.

You can check like this:

1. first run service cron status to check the status.

2. write a test string to the mycommand.log file every minute to check whether the cron is working.
   run crontab -e and add the following content at the end: */1 * * * * echo test > /tmp/mycommand.log 2>&1 save and close then check the content in the /tmp/mycommand.log file.

3. restart the cron service after you change your time or timezone to make sure the cron runs on time. run service cron restart