How would test cron with Magento?

Question

First I need to understand how Magento cron works.

I know how cron works on linux, using crontab -e.
I know I need to set up Magento\'s cron.php to run

Answer 1

On the second half of your question... how to tell if its running.

Here is something that I did. I added the following code at the end of the cron.php file. This updates a simple log called "cronlog.txt" everytime the cron.php file gets called.

So, if I have doubts about cron running I can just glance at that file and see the last date and time the cron.php file ran.

try {
   $myFile = "cronlog.txt";
   $fh = fopen($myFile, 'w');
   $stringData = date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A');
   fwrite($fh, $stringData);
   fclose($fh);
} catch (Exception $e) {
   Mage::printException($e);
}