Crontab how I love thee

March 21, 2008 by Isaac

Crontab has got to be one of the greatest programs ever written. How in the world did we get along before being able to schedule the periodic execution of commands? Of course when I am setting up a cron job I seldom remember the order of the fields, so at the top of my crontab files I always stick a large comment block to remind me. This little diagram is priceless as a header in crontab files.

# *     *   *   *    *  command to be executed
# -     -    -    -    -
# |     |     |     |     |
# |     |     |     |     +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
# |     |     |     +------- month (1 - 12)
# |     |     +--------- day of month (1 - 31)
# |     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
# +------------- min (0 - 59)

Here is a good reference link for all things crontab: Unix Crontab - setting up cron jobs using crontab

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff