Crontab every five minutes
Well, i want to schedules to run one of my file every 5 minutes. Then what would be the best choose. Yes, CRON.
I can schedule my cron to run that file every five minutes to execute
my desired results. Thats why i want to make a note on this regards.
To edit the crontab i use the following command:
$ crontab -e
To list my currnet crontab
$ crontab -l
The following is the format entries in a crontab must be. Note all lines starting with # are ignored, comments.
So in terminal print ‘Hello’ every 5 minutes..
# MIN HOUR MDAY MON DOW COMMAND
*/5 * * * * echo 'Hello'
MIN Minute 0-60
HOUR Hour [24-hour clock] 0-23
MDAY Day of Month 1-31
MON Month 1-12 OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
DOW Day of Week 0-6 OR
sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
COMMAND Command to be run Any valid command-line
Examples
Here are a few examples, to see what some entries look like.
#Run command at 7:00am each weekday [mon-fri]
00 07 * * 1-5 mail_pager.script ‘Wake Up’
#Run command on 1st of each month, at 5:30pm
30 17 1 * * pay_rent.script
#Run command at 8:00am,10:00am and 2:00pm every day
00 8,10,14 * * * do_something.script
#Run command every 5 minutes during market hours
*/5 6-13 * * mon-fri get_stock_quote.script
#Run command every 3-hours while awake
0 7-23/3 * * * drink_water.script
Special Characters in Crontab
You can use an
asterisk
in any category to mean for every item, such as every day or every month.
You can use commas in any category to specify multiple values. For example: mon,wed,fri
You can use dashes to specify ranges. For example: mon-fri, or 9-17
You can use forward slash to specify a repeating range. For example: */5 for every five minutes, hours, days
Special Entries
There are several special entries, some which are just shortcuts, that you can use instead of specifying the full cron entry.
The most useful of these is probably @reboot which allows you to run a command each time the computer gets reboot. This could be useful if you want to start up a server or daemon under a particular user, or if you do not have access to the rc.d/init.d files.
Example Usage:
# restart freevo servers
@reboot freevo webserver start
@reboot freevo recordserver start
The complete list:
| Entry | Description | Equivalent To |
|---|---|---|
| @reboot | Run once, at startup. | None |
| @yearly | Run once a year | 0 0 1 1 * |
| @annually | (same as @yearly) | 0 0 1 1 * |
| @monthly | Run once a month | 0 0 1 * * |
| @weekly | Run once a week | 0 0 * * 0 |
| @daily | Run once a day | 0 0 * * * |
| @midnight | (same as @daily) | 0 0 * * * |
| @hourly | Run once an hour | 0 * * * * |
Miscelleanous Issues
Script Output
If there is any output from your script or command it will be sent to
that user’s e-mail account, on that box. Using the default mailer which
must be setup properly.
You can set the variable MAILTO in the crontab to specify a separate e-mail address to use. For example:
MAILTO=”admin@mydomain.com”
Redirect Output to /dev/null
You can redirect the output from a cron script to /dev/null which just
throws it away. By redirecting to /dev/null you will not receive
anything from the script, even if it is throwing errors.
* * * * * /script/every_minute.pl > /dev/null 2>&1
Missed Schedule Time
Cron does not run a command if it was missed. Your computer must be
running for cron to run the job at the time it is scheduled. For
example, if you have a 1:00am scheduled job and your computer was off
at that time, it will not run the missed job in the morning when you
turn it on.
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