'Adding time stamp to log file in bash script

My script is as follows

if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep ./program > /dev/null
    then
        exit
    else
        echo "---------------------------------------------------" >> Debug.log
        echo "Starting program at:  $(date)" >> Debug.log
        ./program >> Debug.log 2>&1
fi
exit

Via crontab, this script is run every minute. It checks to see if a certain program is running, if it is, great, if not, starts it up.

Now I would like to append timestamps every time the script runs into Debug.log if it found ./program to be running. So under the then line, I added:

echo "Time: $(date)" >> Debug.log

This command does not output anything to Debug.log. It does work however directly from the command line. Why is that so, and can I remedy the problem?

bashtime


Solution 1:[1]

Possible reason is different paths for date in terminal and sh: try using full path to the date which you use directly from command line, i.e. $(/bin/date)

Solution 2:[2]

As mentioned by @{fedorqui 'SO stop harming'} using >> appends to the end of the log file.

Alternatively, this will also limit the log to 1MB:

tail -c 1MB fail.log; echo $(date) run script > file.log

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Wintermute
Solution 2 ntg

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