Sorry, that was a typo. It should be TICKS throughout. The sequence of events that generate the file are definetly finished before my cron job starts. How do I find out what UID the cron job was created versus what UID the script is run as?

I'm positive that my cron job is running. I have it print out messages at different points in the program and i can view these in the /var/spool/mail files.