Crontab failures

[MR ZenWiz]

For the last several days, a crontab job I have had set up for years
has failed to execute.  I hadn't changed anything, but last Saturday
or Suinday, it just stopped working.  Here's the crontab as it was:


# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
:
<blah blah blah>
:
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 7 * * * /home/mar/bin/motd

It's supposed to print a message to my primary terminal window every
morning at 0700, and it works just fine when I run it as a command,
but the crontab entry doesn't work.  On Wednesday, I added tracing to
the crontab by redirecting the outpuit and error output to a file in
my home directory, but that file never appeared.  Yesterday I changed
the crontab to this:

0 7 * * * /home/mar/bin/motd > /tmp/mar.motd.log 2> /tmp/mar.motd.err

This morning, no such files appeared in /tmp.  There is a newline at
the end of the command in the crontab.  I can't find any reference for
an error or log file that exists for crontab by default (all the
references say to redirect the output to a file - not working either).

What the heck??

Thanks in advance.