Re: CRON - are there any help files?

[Mike Schienle <mgs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 1:12 AM, Alexei Zoubov wrote:

> I've stumbled into another obstacle - for my autoresponder, I need 
> to make a cron entry (seems like into crontab).
>
> I couldn't find any reference to cron in iTolls 6.5.7 manual - in 
> old WebTen manual there was at least one page and not very clear 
> anyway.

It's a UNIX thing, not necessarily a web thing, so iTools and WebTen 
wouldn't be obliged to cover it. Check out the man pages for cron and 
crontab from the terminal command line.
man cron
man crontab

I also have a brief discussion of it on a page on my site (near the 
bottom) - http://www.ivsoftware.com/backup.shtml

The basic thing to do is enter crontab -e at the command line, which 
will bring up an editor (typically vi) so you can add entries to your 
crontab file. You have to exit the editor, not just save the file, 
for the crontab to take effect. Exiting actually runs a check of the 
crontab to make sure it is syntactically correct.

Each line of the crontab contains the minute, hour, day of month, 
month, day of week and jobname with any parameters on each line of 
the crontab. I always use the following line as the first entry of my 
crontab to remember the order:
# min hour dom mon dow job

Here are some of the entries in my crontab to give you an idea:
45 0 * * * $HOME/bin/dbDump.sh IVSoftware LightningSite
0,20,40 * * * * $HOME/bin/uptime.sh
15 01 1,16 * * $HOME/landsat7/landsat7update.sh
30 18 * * 4 $HOME/bin/mailascii -s "Timecard Reminder" mgs ~/Timecard

The 1st one runs a shell script to back up some database tables at 
12:45 every morning. The 2nd one runs a shell script that logs the 
uptime stats to a database every 20 minutes. The 3rd one runs a 
command to update some files at 1:15 AM on the 1st and 16th of every 
month. The last one emails me at 6:30 PM every Thursday to remind me 
to fill out my timecard.

Mike Schienle

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