Crontab not working for mac

Question

I am new to crontab and I have two questions, one is an example that I think should be working... and the other is a format question

I execute the following:

EDITOR=emacs crontab -e

And I put in

*       *       *       *       *       *       say test

When I quit out it says

crontab: installing new crontab

But I don't hear the test voice coming every minute like it should.

I used this site as a reference for the format. And I notice they use six fields. However I've inherited a crontab at work that only uses 5. Can you leave out the last? How does the cron know?

Answer 1

Unless OSX is doing something wonky, crontabs only have 5 time fields, and you've got 6. it's

minute hour day_of_month month day_of_week

So, most likely your crontab is trying to execute a script named *, with say test as an argument.