cron usage

[David Henderson]

While this is simply just a proof of concept, I could not get this to
run correctly.  It had to be an obvious two-step approach, so I
created an initial root crontab and a small shell script to
dynamically create it there afterwards based on the contents of
/etc/cron.d.

Initial /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root:
* * * * * /etc/cron.d/.cron.d

/etc/cron.d/.cron.d:
#!/bin/sh
cat /etc/cron.d/* > /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
echo "* * * * * $0" >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

I can see that the actual /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root file continues
to dynamically populate based on the contents of /etc/cron.d, however,
none of the jobs listed in those files actually runs.  Here's a sample
of what would be inside one of them:

* * * * * date > /tmp/test1.txt

I've also tried with and without usernames and is doesn't work either.
Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Dave