Completely safe - and in most cases mandatory, otherwise jobs can end up being skipped.
Just make sure you are executing cron.sh
not cron.php
Just note that the regularity of the cron itself won't dictate when cron operations take place - the module itself does that.
Eg. Using the awesome MageRun to list tasks,
[www-data@acc1 .microcloud ~]
[~]$ mr_examplecom sys:cron:list
Cronjob List
+-----------------------------------------+------+----+----+----+----+
| Job | m | h | D | M | WD |
+-----------------------------------------+------+----+----+----+----+
| aggregate_sales_report_bestsellers_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_coupons_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_invoiced_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_order_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_refunded_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_shipment_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| aggregate_sales_report_tax_data | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| captcha_delete_expired_images | */10 | * | * | * | * |
| captcha_delete_old_attempts | */30 | * | * | * | * |
| catalog_product_alert | | | | | |
| catalog_product_index_price_reindex_all | 0 | 2 | * | * | * |
| catalogrule_apply_all | 0 | 1 | * | * | * |
| core_clean_cache | 30 | 2 | * | * | * |
| currency_rates_update | | | | | |
| log_clean | | | | | |
| newsletter_send_all | */5 | * | * | * | * |
| paypal_fetch_settlement_reports | | | | | |
| persistent_clear_expired | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| sales_clean_quotes | 0 | 0 | * | * | * |
| sitemap_generate | | | | | |
| system_backup | | | | | |
| xmlconnect_notification_send_all | */5 | * | * | * | * |
+-----------------------------------------+------+----+----+----+----+
You can see that amongst the tasks, the most regular in this list is every 5 minutes. Which means that even if the cron were to be configured to run every minute, it wouldn't make a difference, as newsletter_send_all
and xmlconnect_notification_send_all
would only run every 5 minutes.
If CLI isn't your bag, then you can use (the equally awesome) Aoe Scheduler to visualise the timeline.
This will let you see when tasks are due to run, and if they are being executed or skipped.