You know, if my relatives call me with computer questions, I usually let it go to voice mail and call them an hour later. The answer is usually, "Oh, nevermind, I figured it out." That small bit of time usually saves me some time providing family "customer support".

So, with a little time and determination, most problems are solved. Having said that, I figured out the above problem(s) with the cron.

First of all, most of the problems were in the script itself. The first one was that when I was executing the script and it was working, I was logged in as root, not the user. This automatically gave the log file I was creating permissions as the root as the owner, not my user. So, I erased the file and let the cron script create it and this solved the owner permissions problem.

The second problem was that if you are using the php command line interface, all of your include files and references to files must have the full path spelled out - /home/my_user/blah/include.php This also was required for the script to write out the log file: /home/my_user/blah/logfile.txt

So, with that it worked. I also set the cron to run every couple of minutes while I was making / testing changes. That seemed to help in the debug process.

Hope this helps somebody.

Charlesh