How to run gpg from a script run by cron?

I have a script that has a part that looks like that:

for file in `ls *.tar.gz`; do
  echo encrypting $file
  gpg --passphrase-file /home/$USER/.gnupg/backup-passphrase \
    --simple-sk-checksum -c $file
done

For some reason if I run this script manually, works perfectly fine and all files are encrypted. If I run this as cron job, echo $file works fine (I see "encrypting <file>" in the log), but the file doesn't get encrypted and gpg silent fails with no stdout/stderr output.

Any clues?

Solution

It turns out that the answer was easier than I expected. There is a --batch parameter missing, gpg tries to read from /dev/tty that doesn't exist for cron jobs. To debug that I have used --exit-on-status-write-error param. But to use that I was inspired by exit status 2, reported by echoing $? as Cd-Man suggested.