How to Troubleshoot Cron Jobs That Succeed but Ship No Files

I once had a nightly export job that showed success in cron but delivered an empty folder to the vendor SFTP. The service account had no error email, so support only heard about it when the vendor asked why the report was missing. At first it looked like an SFTP issue, but the file was never created locally. The script returned zero because the SQL client swallowed a permissions warning and…