Verify if crontab works

The syntax for the crontab entry looks correct. Indeed, if you edit your crontab using "crontab -e" (as you should), you'll get an error if you specify a syntactically invalid crontab entry anyway.

1. Firstly, does /path_to_my_php_script/info.php run correctly from the command-line?

2. If so, does it also run correctly like this?:

   /bin/sh -c "(export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin; /path_to_my_php_script/info.php </dev/null)"
   

3. If that works, does it work like this?

   /bin/sh -c "(export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin; /path_to_my_php_script/info.php </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1)"
   

Step (3) is similar to how cron will run your program (as documented in "man 5 cron".

The most likely problem you're having is that the PATH cron is using to run your program is too restrictive. Therefore, you may wish to add something like the following to the top of your crontab entry (you'll need to add in whatever directories your script will need):

PATH=~/bin:/usr/bin/:/bin

Also note that cron will by default use /bin/sh, not bash. If you need bash, also add this to the start of your crontab file:

SHELL=/bin/bash

Note that both those changes will affect all the crontab entries. If you just want to modify these values for your info.php program, you could do something like this:

*/2 * * * * /bin/bash -c ". ~/.bashrc; /path_to_my_php_script/info.php"

It's also worth mentioning that on a system configured for "mail" (in other words a system which has an MTA configured [sendmail/postfix/etc]), all output from crontab programs is sent to you via email automatically. A default Ubuntu desktop system won't have local mail configured, but if you're working on a server you can just type "mail" in a terminal to see all those cron mails. This also applies to the "at" command.

Although very rare, sometimes cron stops working properly even though the service is running. Here is how to verify that crond is running and stop/start the service.

On Linux:

service crond status
service crond stop
service crond start

On Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems:

service cron status
service cron stop
service cron start

Do not redirect error output to /dev/null and grep /var/log/syslog for cron output.

grep cron /var/log/syslog

You can immediately show errors when saving a file after editing /etc/crontab or files inside /etc/cron.d/ with:

tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep --line-buffered cron

If the edit is ok, you will only see the RELOAD notice, errors will occur like

Jul 9 09:39:01 vm cron[1129]: Error: bad day-of-month; while reading /etc/cron.d/new