wp cron event run needs to output the time and date when a cron job is run

[rklrkl]

Feature Request

• Yes, I reviewed the contribution guidelines.

If a cron job is run when I execute "wp cron event run", then the output is something like this for the cron job "cronjob_name":

Executed the cron event 'cronjob_name' in 0.002s.

There is a very obvious missing piece of information here - the time and date the cron job ran! When you have a regular running cron job that fails once, but succeeds at all other times, knowing the time/date it failed is very useful forensic evidence.

Please add the time and date to that "Executed..." cron job message.

[swissspidy]

It's not like you're scheduling a cron job, so the date / time is the one from when you execute wp cron event run, no?

$ date && wp cron event run
Fri May  8 21:52:31 CEST 2026
Executed the cron event 'cronjob_name' in 0.002s.

[rklrkl]

For some WordPress projects, we turn off Wordpress' cron and schedule a regular run of "wp cron event run --due-now" via Linux cron instead (this is particularly important on dev and staging sites where there might be long gaps between site accesses that drive WP cron jobs). The output from each Linux cron run is appended to a log file, hence the need for a time and date to be present in the output so we can tell when any errors occurred.

[swissspidy]

Right, this is the common use case for wp cron event run --due-now. Glad you find it useful 👍

I'm just curious why the time & date needs to be printed by this command and can't be handled by your scheduling solution. Even scheduling date && wp cron event run --due-now would solve this. Printing the time & date ourselves doesn't seem to fit the WP-CLI philosophy, which highlights composability and "decisions, not options".

[rklrkl]

It's just strange that a WP-CLI cron command to run jobs at particular intervals is happy to output how long it took to run in milliseconds, but won't actually output exactly when it was run (if nothing else, this confirms it's running at the expected time intervals and isn't skipping any - an important piece of info for regularly scheduled commands).

I'd be quite happy if the time/date it was run required an optional flag like --timestamp or something similar for it to be output. It gets messy to use the date command in a crontab to keep it on one line:

echo -n "$(date) " && wp cron...

Even then you might need date command params to reformat the output (was never fond of the timezone and the year being the final two fields). Would be much nicer if the time/date was output in a "sensible" format by WP-CLI at the beginning of the line.