[plug] Crontab??

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <d12e5c904072704403d48c820 at mail.gmail.com>
on Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 07:40:32PM +0800, Senectus . wrote:
> I have various jobs that I want to start and stop at particular times.
> I've tried all sorts of things but I've never seem to be able to get
> crontab to do what I want it to do, when I want it...
> I've read man files (not much use),

?! What do you mean? Crontab is a highly-established tradition, so there
should be no problem using it. Google must surely be a vast source of
repetitive training materials! If not, I have included a sample from the
man page supplied in Debian woody (the man page describes the exact
format, too). If none of these things works, perhaps there is a problem
with your computer? There should be a `cron` process running at all
times. Depending on your OS/distro, maybe you need to "enable" cron in
some way (wow)? It would normally be started from /etc/init.d/cron when
booting.

    # run five minutes after midnight, every day
    5 0 * * *       $HOME/bin/daily.job >> $HOME/tmp/out 2>&1
    # run at 2:15pm on the first of every month -- output mailed to paul
    15 14 1 * *     $HOME/bin/monthly
    # run at 10 pm on weekdays, annoy Joe
    0 22 * * 1-5   mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?%
    23 0-23/2 * * * echo "run 23 minutes after midn, 2am, 4am ..., everyday"
    5 4 * * sun     echo "run at 5 after 4 every sunday"