ARCHIVED: What are cron and crontab, and how do I use them?
On most systems, you must get permission from the
system administrator before you can submit job requests to
cron. On some shared systems, because there is only
one crontab file, only the administrator has access to the
crontab
command.
For information about using cron on your Webserve account, see ARCHIVED: Cron: Schedule jobs on the IU WWW servers.
The cron daemon is a long-running process that executes commands at specific dates and times. You can use this to schedule activities, either as one-time events or as recurring tasks.
To schedule one-time only tasks with cron, use the
at
or batch
command. For more,
see ARCHIVED: In Unix, what are the at and batch commands, and how do I use them to submit non-interactive job requests?
For commands that need to be executed repeatedly (e.g., hourly, daily,
or weekly), you can use the crontab
command. The
crontab
command creates a crontab file containing commands
and instructions for the cron daemon to execute. You
can use the crontab
command with the following options:
crontab -a filename |
Install
filename as your crontab file. On many systems,
this command is executed simply as crontab filename
(i.e., without the -a option).
|
crontab -e |
Edit your crontab file, or create one if it doesn't already exist.
|
crontab -l |
Display your crontab file. |
crontab -r |
Remove your crontab file. |
crontab -v |
Display the last time you edited your crontab file. (This option
is available on only a few systems.)
|
crontab -u user |
Used in conjunction with other options, this option allows you
to modify or view the crontab file of
user . When available, only administrators can use
this option.
|
Each entry in a crontab file consists of six fields, specifying in the following order:
minute(s) hour(s) day(s) month(s) weekday(s) command(s)
The fields are separated by spaces or tabs. The first five are integer patterns and the sixth is the command to execute. The following table briefly describes each of the fields:
Field | Value | Description |
---|---|---|
minute | 0-59 | The exact minute that the command sequence executes
|
hour | 0-23 | The hour of the day that the command sequence executes
|
day | 1-31 | The day of the month that the command sequence executes
|
month | 1-12 | The month of the year that the command sequence executes
|
weekday | 0-6 | The day of the week that the command sequence executes (Sunday
= 0, Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2, and so forth)
|
command | Special | The complete sequence of commands to execute. The command string
must conform to Bourne shell syntax. Commands,
executables (such as scripts), or combinations are acceptable.
|
Each of the patterns from the first five fields may be either
*
(an asterisk), meaning all legal values, or a list
of elements separated by commas. An element is either a number or
an inclusive range, indicated by two numbers separated by a minus
sign (e.g., 10-12
). You can specify days with two fields:
day of the month and day of the week. If you specify both of them
as a list of elements, cron will observe both of them,
for example:
0 0 1,15 * 1 /mydir/myprogram
The cron daemon would run the program
myprogram
in the mydir
directory on the
first and fifteenth of each month, as well as on every Monday. To
specify days by only one field, the other field should be set to
*
, for example:
0 0 * * 1 /mydir/myprogram
In the above example, the program would run only on Mondays.
If a cron job specified in your crontab entry produces any error messages when it runs, you will get a mail message reporting the errors.
For more, consult the following relevant man pages:
man crontab man cron man at man batch
At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see Get help for Linux or Unix at IU.
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Last modified on 2018-01-18 10:00:17.