As this is something almost all newbies might find helpful, I've cc'ed it
back to the list.
No problem. you don't want man crontab -- you want man 5 crontab. (Sad
that I know this off the top of my head). One of the tricks to know about
man is that there's often more than one man page for a command. You can
find extra man pages by the following (or several other) methods:
locate crontab | grep man
In this case, you'll see there's one in man1 (the default man) and in man5
(which is invoked by man 5).
First, you never edit /etc/crontab directly. Use crontab -e (for
edit) instead.
Let's say you want to start a job named foo at 5 pm every day of the week:
0 17 * * * foo
and you wanted to kill it with a kill script named killfoo at 7:30 am
every day:
30 7 * * * killfoo
There are other examples in the man 5 crontab for monthly, etc.
On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Dan Browning (Network Admin) wrote:
> Thanks for the great tips, but I'm having troubling making crontab entries.
> I read the crond and crontab man page, but that didn't help much. Should I
> make a crontab file in /var/spool/cron with my username as a file name like
> the man page says or should I add it to /etc/crontab? What's the
> difference? Could I make a crontab in my home directory? We need a faq or
> howto on this.
>
> Here's my /etc/crontab:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> SHELL=/bin/bash
> PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
> MAILTO=root
>
> # run-parts
> 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
> 02 1 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
> 02 2 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
> 02 3 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> I don't know what it means, and I don't know what to add in order to execute
> my process. And I still don't see how to schedule the times in there. I
> must REALLY be missing something.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
> -dan
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Deirdre Saoirse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Friday, February 26, 1999 6:34 AM
> > To: Dan Browning (Network Admin)
> > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: Scheduling programs for specific times, how is it done?
> >
> >
> > You can use cron at 7:30 to kill the job by name. suppose
> > your process was
> > started at 5 pm and is named foo.
> >
> > Then you'd enter a crontab entry to, at 7:30, "killall foo"
> >
> > On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Dan Browning (Network Admin) wrote:
> >
> > > I understand cron.daily, .hourly, etc. But I would like to
> > have a program
> > > run at a specific time (say, 5:00pm every night), and then
> > be killed the
> > > next morning at 7:30am. How can this be done?
> >
> > _Deirdre * http://disclaimer.deirdre.org * http://www.deirdre.net
> > "I would rather choose to have my leg bitten off than to buy NT"
> > Rob Narberes, Information Systems Manager, DNA Plant Technologies Corp
> > as quoted in (!) Computerworld
> >
>
_Deirdre * http://disclaimer.deirdre.org * http://www.deirdre.net
"I would rather choose to have my leg bitten off than to buy NT"
Rob Narberes, Information Systems Manager, DNA Plant Technologies Corp
as quoted in (!) Computerworld
