[plug] Cron Jobs

[Jason Nicholls]

G'day,

On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 12:22:42PM -0400, Steege, Phil E wrote:
> It is pretty easy using the crontab command.
> 'crontab -l' will show the contents of your crontab file listing the
> scheduled jobs.
> 'crontab -e' will allow you to edit it.
> 'man crontab' should be all you need.

I'm a little uncertain whether he was after help with setting cron jobs or
writing scripts for cron to execute.

> > From: Joel Fraser [mailto:joel231 at yahoo.com] 
> > I was wondering if anyone has a site that could help me with writing 
> > cron jobs, as i havent done this before and need a little help with it.

What exactly are you trying to achieve, or just messing about?
Here is simple example.

First a script, lets say it's in a file called "~/bin/simple.sh":

--------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash

echo "the time is" `date` >> ~/simple.output
--------------------------------------------

Next up, a crontab entry (crontab -e):

--------------------------------------------
# run at 30mins past the hour, every hour, every day, every month
30 * * * *      ~/bin/simple.sh
--------------------------------------------

What we've done here is write a shell script to create output like:

    the time is Thu Jul 11 00:37:15 WST 2002

And have cron run this every hour. After a while the file would look like:

    the time is Thu Jul 11 00:30:00 WST 2002 
    the time is Thu Jul 11 01:30:00 WST 2002 
    the time is Thu Jul 11 02:30:00 WST 2002 
    the time is Thu Jul 11 03:30:00 WST 2002 
    the time is Thu Jul 11 04:30:00 WST 2002 
    the time is Thu Jul 11 05:30:00 WST 2002 


"man 5 crontab" for info on setting crontab entries.



Regards,

Jason Nicholls
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