Answer by erjoalgo for Why crontab scripts are not working?

This happened to me recently: I had two lines that modified PATH, like this:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/home/ernesto/bin

Then, later in the file:

PATH=$PATH:/some/other/path

as one would typically do in a shell-interpreted context. However, $PATH seems to not have been expanded, causing all my jobs to fail. The solution is to put everything on a single line.

Edit:

Since I didn't want to wait until the next normal iteration of anacron to verify my jobs worked correctly, I ran:

anacron -fnd "jobname"

Where "jobname" is the job identifier specified in anacrontab. This forces jobs to be run by the same anacron process, sequentially, and without delay.