I tested two ways to keep cron jobs healthy. The boring one won.

I tested two ways to keep cron jobs healthy. The boring one won. I used to think small automation bugs were cheap. A temp file left behind? Fine. A cron job that logs a little too much? Fine. A shell script that works only if you run it from one exact directory? Also fine, apparently. That mindset is how you end up with a pile of tiny failures that all look harmless on their own and then eat your afternoon when they line up. So I ran a simple comparison in my own setup. On one side: ignore the little stuff and keep shipping . On the other: fix the tiny problem as soon as I spot it . I expected the first one to be faster. It is faster, if you only count the five minutes you save right now. But if you count the time I lost later, the second one wins hard. The setup I had a few cron jobs doing basic work: publishing tasks cleanup jobs log rotation a couple of scripts that chained together other scripts Nothing fancy. Just enough moving parts to get annoying when one link breaks. The pain