Cron was working all along but I fooled myself. The true problem
right now is that all the job output such as error messages or
anything else that becomes either standard error or standard
output is presently vaporizing somewhere rather than being mailed
back to me. I also thought I remembered seeing a message from
cron every minute in syslog but that only happens when some job
matches the time criteria. Since the Pi has only one working line
in crontab, there isn't much to see most of the time related to
cron.
It also looks like cron as configured on this Pi doesn't
default to off and the kodi issue was a red haring. The real
issue is the cronjob output going "poof!" As soon as I figure
that out, trouble-shooting will be normal.
/etc/default/cron on the Pi is identical to
/etc/default/cron on a Debian wheezy system. It's nice to know
the Pi is not setup too differently.
Anyway, thanks for helping me think on this.
Martin McCormick
