Ruby libary and command line tool for testing cron jobs.

Execute an (almost) immediate and transient cron job using the same environment that is used to run your user’s crontab.

• clap

gem install crontest

to run crontest from the command line:

crontest 'echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt' &

or, to call from another ruby program

require 'crontest'
Crontest.run("echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt")

these will both run echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt as a cron job. it can take up to a minute to run as cron’s timing resolution is one minute.

crontest will create a backup file of your current crontab (cron-backup-[timestamp]) in the directory where directory you run it, and then restore it.

Options:

pass in options from the command line or Crontest.run(command, options)

--no-backup 
-n
:backup => false 

no backup file

-v
:verbose => true

verbose output

I highly encourage you to keep a separate backup of your crontab before trying this tool as it is brand new and relatively untested.