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A Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

Cron jobs allow scheduling commands to run at specific dates and times. The document provides examples of cron job formats to run a command every minute, every hour at 30 minutes past, daily at 3am, weekly on Sundays, monthly on the 1st, and more. It also explains how to view, edit, and remove cron jobs using the crontab command line utility.

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668 views4 pages

A Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

Cron jobs allow scheduling commands to run at specific dates and times. The document provides examples of cron job formats to run a command every minute, every hour at 30 minutes past, daily at 3am, weekly on Sundays, monthly on the 1st, and more. It also explains how to view, edit, and remove cron jobs using the crontab command line utility.

Uploaded by

Mikiyas Tsegaye
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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A Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

Cron is one of the most useful utility that you can find in any Unix-like operating
system. It is used to schedule commands at a specific time. These scheduled
commands or tasks are known as “Cron Jobs”. Cron is generally used for running
scheduled backups, monitoring disk space, deleting files (for example log files)
periodically which are no longer required, running system maintenance tasks and a lot
more. In this brief guide, we will see the basic usage of Cron Jobs in Linux.

The Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

The typical format of a cron job is:

Minute(0-59) Hour(0-24) Day_of_month(1-31) Month(1-12) Day_of_week(0-6)


Command_to_execute

Just memorize the cron job format or print the following illustration and keep it in
your desk.

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)


# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
#│││││ 7 is also Sunday on some systems)
#│││││
#│││││
# * * * * * command_to_execute

Cron job format

In the above picture, the asterisks refers the specific blocks of time.

To display the contents of the crontab file of the currently logged in user:

$ crontab -l

To edit the current user’s cron jobs, do:

$ crontab -e

If it is the first time, you will be asked to choose an editor to edit the cron jobs.

no crontab for sk - using an empty one

Select an editor. To change later, run 'select-editor'.


1. /bin/nano <---- easiest
2. /usr/bin/vim.basic
3. /usr/bin/vim.tiny
4. /bin/ed
Choose 1-4 [1]:

Choose any one that suits you. Here it is how a sample crontab file looks like.

In this file, you need to add your cron jobs one by one.

To edit the crontab of a different user, for example ostechnix, do:

$ crontab -u ostechnix -e

Let us see some examples.

1. To run a cron job at every minute, the format should be like below.

* * * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is 10:00, the next job will run at 10:01, 10:02, 10:03 and so
on.

2. To run cron job at every 5th minute, add the following in your crontab file.

*/5 * * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is 10:00, the next job will run at 10:05, 10:10, 10:15 and so
on.

3. To run a cron job at every quarter hour (i.e every 15th minute), add this:

*/15 * * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is 10:00, the next job will run at 10:15, 10:30, 10:45 and so
on.

4. To run a cron job every hour at minute 30:

30 * * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is 10:00, the next job will run at 10:30, 11:30, 12:30 and so
on.

5. You can also define multiple time intervals separated by commas. For example, the
following cron job will run three times every hour, at minute 0, 5 and 10:

0,5,10 * * * * <command-to-execute>

6. Run a cron job every half hour i.e at every 30th minute:

*/30 * * * * <command-to-execute>
For example if the time is now 10:00, the next job will run at 10:30, 11:00, 11:30 and
so on.

7. Run a job every hour (at minute 0):

0 * * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is now 10:00, the next job will run at 11:00, 12:00, 12:00 and
so on.

8. Run a job every 2 hours:

0 */2 * * * <command-to-execute>

For example if the time is now 10:00, the next job will run at 12:00.

9. Run a job every day (It will run at 00:00):

0 0 * * * <command-to-execute>

10. Run a job every day at 3am:

0 3 * * * <command-to-execute>

11. Run a job every Sunday:

0 0 * * SUN <command-to-execute>

Or,

0 0 * * 0 <command-to-execute>

It will run at exactly at 00:00 on Sunday.

12. Run a job on every day-of-week from Monday through Friday i.e every
weekday:

0 0 * * 1-5 <command-to-execute>

The job will start at 00:00.

13. Run a job every month (i.e at 00:00 on day-of-month 1):

0 0 1 * * <command-to-execute>

14. Run a job at 16:15 on day-of-month 1:

15 16 1 * * <command-to-execute>

15. Run a job at every quarter i.e on day-of-month 1 in every 3rd month:
0 0 1 */3 * <command-to-execute>

16. Run a job on a specific month at a specific time:

5 0 * 4 * <command-to-execute>

The job will start at 00:05 in April.

17. Run a job every 6 months:

0 0 1 */6 * <command-to-execute>

This cron job will start at 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in every 6th month.

18. Run a job every year:

0 0 1 1 * <command-to-execute>

This cron job will start at 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in January.

We can also use the following strings to define job.

@reboot Run once, at startup.


@yearly Run once a year.
@annually (same as @yearly).
@monthly Run once a month.
@weekly Run once a week.
@daily Run once a day.
@midnight (same as @daily).
@hourly Run once an hour.

19. To run a job every time the server is rebooted, add this line in your crontab file.

@reboot <command-to-execute>

20. To remove all cron jobs for the current user:

$ crontab -r

For more details, check man pages.

$ man crontab

At this stage, you might have a basic understanding of what is Crontab and how to
create and run a cron job in Unix-like systems.

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