How to start and verify cron?

[David Karr <davidmichaelkarr at gmail dot com>]

I've checked the user guide and the FAQ, and I can't find any information
about how to start cron and verify that it's working.  I found other blog
posts on other sites, but some of them are old.

I had installed cron, and I thought it was working, but now I think that it
is not.  If I edit "~/crontab" and then run "crontab -l", it lists the
changes I've made to jobs, so at least that is working.  The real job I
have didn't appear to be doing what it was supposed to be doing, so I added
a new trivial job that just appends output from "date" to a file in my
homedir, and after the scheduled time of the job, the file was not created.

This is the additional job I added:

    40,42,44 * * * * date >> /home/<myuid>/date.txt

I did find a "/var/log/cron.log", but it is empty, and the modtime is from
a few months ago.

One blog post I found talks about running "cygrunsrv -I cron -p
/usr/sbin/cron -a -D". I just did this, and it reports "The specified
service already exists."

This is my uname -a output:

    CYGWIN_NT-6.1 ... 3.0.3(0.338/5/3) 2019-03-09 19:12 x86_64 Cygwin

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