crontab!

[sde]

this project i'm working on tody is teaching me a lot .. i got perl 5x installed and everything is working great ..

now i need to setup a cron job to run once per minute.

i navigate to my cron directory: /var/spool/cron

then i try to edit the file: vi cron

i have it opened in vi , but the problem is that as soon as i try to add my line, i can not.. i puts up some other info as soon as i try to type anything.

is there a proper way to do this? i checked.. and i don't think there are any NUMS on cron jobs

[revolution]

are you using i for insert into vi? ESC should get you back to command mode

[bdl]

You don't edit the cron file directly, you use the command

'crontab -e'

This command edits the default systemwide cron file, if you want to edit a specific user's file, you can use

'crontab -u $USER -e'

..obviously substituting $USER for the username you want to use. If you want to edit a file by hand and have it become part of your cron, just point cron at it with the

'crontab filename'

command. This is what I do, I keep a personal .crontab file in my home directory and just run 'crontab ~/.crontab'. Enjoy!

[sde]

thanks b, .. but where do i set the time then?

i have a perl script named "status" that i need to execute once per minute.

crontab -e status 1 * * *

?? does that seem right?

[bdl]

Originally posted by mmilano
thanks b, .. but where do i set the time then?

i have a perl script named "status" that i need to execute once per minute.

crontab -e status 1 * * *

?? does that seem right?

No, whatcha do it edit the file in a certain way so that it executes commands based on your time settings. So use 'crontab -e' and then edit the file by hand. Her's an example to help you out.

# example crontab #

# time is listed as: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week #

# min hr dom mon dow #   # execute #

# entry will run the executable once an hour #

0 0-23/1 * * * exec /path/to/executable  

# entry will run the executable once a minute #

0-59/1 * * * * exec /path/to/executable

# eof #

Here's a quick link I found on google that may help.

[sde]

Thanks BDL! Everything works great now!