Is there an easy way to tell if cron is actually running? I'm not talking about whether my crontab entries are valid, but is cron actually attempting to execute those entries?
I'm on Ubuntu 14
2 Answers
On Ubuntu 14.04 (which uses upstart) you can check the service status using service cron status:
$ service cron status cron start/running, process 1414 The systemd equivalent (applicable for newer systems) is systemctl status cron.service
You could also examine the CRON entries in the system log, e.g. grep CRON /var/log/syslog
You can check the status of cron service or any service for that matter using
service service.name status In case of cron
service cron status 
