Thanks for all the help, Paul hit the nail on the head. Mplayer likes an interactive shell. Changing the redirection of output streams helped me fix the problem: Here is my new crontab that works: 0 22 * * 1-5 /home/xxxxxx/scripts/radio2 >> /dev/null 2>&1 5 2 * * 1-5 killall -9 mplayer >> /dev/null 2>&1 Thanks for the help everyone, Kevin