Cron doctor

Skill suryast/free-ai-agent-skills/cron-doctor

Install

npx -y skills add suryast/free-ai-agent-skills --skill cron-doctor

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What its author says it does

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Diagnose and triage cron job failures. Checks job states, identifies error patterns, prioritizes by criticality, generates health reports. Triggers on: cron failures, job health check, scheduled task errors, cron diagnosis, job not running, backup failed.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

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Compatible with Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, and any SKILL.md-compatible agent.

Cron Doctor

Diagnose and triage cron job failures.

Usage

When asked to check cron health or diagnose failures:

1. List All Jobs

# List user's crontab
crontab -l

# List system crontabs
sudo cat /etc/crontab
ls -la /etc/cron.d/

2. Check Recent Execution

# Check cron logs (location varies by system)
# Debian/Ubuntu:
grep CRON /var/log/syslog | tail -50

# RHEL/CentOS:
tail -50 /var/log/cron

# macOS:
log show --predicate 'process == "cron"' --last 1h

# Check for specific job output
grep "your_job_name" /var/log/syslog | tail -20

3. Identify Problems

Error patterns to watch:

"command not found" — Missing executable or PATH issue
"Permission denied" — File/directory permissions wrong
"No such file or directory" — Script path incorrect
"timeout" — Job took too long
"ECONNREFUSED" — Network/service down
"rate limit" — API throttling
Missing output — Job may not be running at all

4. Triage Priority

Priority	Criteria
🔴 Critical	Trading, backup, security jobs
🟠 High	User-facing deliveries
🟡 Medium	Monitoring, research jobs
🟢 Low	Nice-to-have, non-essential

5. Generate Report

Write to ~/reports/cron-health-YYYY-MM-DD.md:

# Cron Health Report - [DATE]

## Summary
- ✅ Healthy: X jobs
- ⚠️ Warning: X jobs  
- ❌ Failed: X jobs

## Failed Jobs

### [Job Name]
- **Error:** [message]
- **Last Success:** [date]
- **Priority:** [level]
- **Fix:** [suggested action]

## Recommendations
1. [Action item]
2. [Action item]

6. Common Fixes

Error	Fix
Command not found	Use full path to executable, or set PATH in crontab
Permission denied	Check file permissions, run `chmod +x script.sh`
No output	Add `>> /tmp/job.log 2>&1` to capture output
Wrong timezone	Set `TZ=` in crontab or use system timezone
Rate limit	Reduce frequency or add backoff

7. Debugging Tips

# Test cron environment (cron has minimal PATH)
env -i /bin/sh -c 'echo $PATH'

# Verify script runs manually
/path/to/your/script.sh

# Check if cron daemon is running
systemctl status cron   # Linux
launchctl list | grep cron  # macOS

Escalation

If 3+ critical jobs failed, alert the user immediately.

Verification Gates

Before claiming diagnosis complete:

All failed jobs listed — none skipped or ignored
Priority assigned — based on impact, not just recency
Fix suggested — actionable next step for each failure
Report written — to ~/reports/cron-health-YYYY-MM-DD.md
Critical failures escalated — 3+ critical = alert user