Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition

Name

crontab — stdin  stdout  - file  -- opt  --help  --version

Synopsis

crontab [options] [file]

The crontab command, like at, schedules jobs for specific times. However, crontab is for recurring jobs, such as “Run this command at midnight on the second Tuesday of each month.” To make this work, you edit and save a file (called your crontab file), which automatically gets installed in a system directory (/var/spool/cron). Once a minute, a Linux process called cron wakes up, checks your crontab file, and executes any jobs that are due.

$ crontab -e

Edit your crontab file in your default editor ($EDITOR)

$ crontab -l

Print your crontab file on standard output

$ crontab -r

Delete your crontab file

$ crontab myfile

Install the file myfile as your crontab file

The superuser can add the option -u username to work with other users’ crontab files.

Crontab files contain one job per line. (Blank lines and comment lines beginning with “#” are ignored.) Each line has six fields, separated by whitespace. The first five fields specify the time to run the job, and the last is the job command itself.

Minutes of the hour

Integers between 0 and 59. This can be a single number (30), a sequence of numbers separated by commas (0,15,30,45), a range (20–30), a sequence of ranges (0-15,50-59), or an asterisk to mean “all.” You can also specify “every nth time” with the suffix /n; for instance, both */12 and 0-59/12 mean 0,12,24,36,48 (i.e., every 12 minutes).

Hours of the day

Same syntax as for minutes.