cron_101.rst

Crontab

Laziness is considered a virtue in system administration, meaning you should figure out ways to avoid having to perform the same task regularly by hand. Cron to the rescue!

cron is the time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email.

—cron - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

cron allows you to run routine jobs on a Unix-based system automatically at a specific future time or at regular intervals rather than running such jobs manually. Even knowing just the basics of cron is a huge win, as this tool increases productivity, saves time and is not prone to human error, i.e. forgetting to run a job.

What is a "crontab"?

"crontabs" (or cron tables) are the way that a user schedules a job to run under cron. They're composed of the following parts:

• cron expression: A string that describes the time or times when the command should be run
• user (optional): If the crontab is specified in a centralized location instead of the user's personal crontab file, this field contains the username that the command should be run as. This allows cron to run a command as you, even if you're not logged in at the time. This field isn't used in a user's personal crontab file.
• command: The rest of the line is interpreted as the command that cron should run at the specified time.

"crontab" may also refer to a file containing any number of these cron tables, one per line.

crontab files are commonly found in a couple of different places:

• /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.hourly, and so on: System crontabs, or crontabs installed by a software package
• /var/spool/cron/<username>: Users' crontabs; these are created and managed with the crontab command.

The crontab command

How do I list jobs scheduled to run with cron?

The easiest way to see jobs running regularly on the system (aka "cron jobs") is to type:

user@opsschool ~$ crontab -l

in the shell. This will show all the cron jobs scheduled to run as the current user. For example, if you are logged in as jdoe and there are no cron jobs running the output will be something like:

jdoe@opsschool ~$ crontab: no crontab for jdoe

If there are jobs scheduled to run, there will be a list of lines that looks something like this:

05 12 * * 0 /home/jdoe /home/jdoe/jobs/copy-to-partition

How do I schedule a job with cron?

The way to schedule a new job is to type:

user@opsschool ~$ crontab -e

in the shell. This will open an editor with your personal "crontab" file (or an empty file if you don't have any cron jobs already scheduled).

Then add a line to the file that looks like this:

0 * * * * date

and save and close the file.

The cron job you just created will run the command date at the top of every hour (e.g. at 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, etc.). Depending on how your system is configured, it may begin to email you the output of that command each time it's run, or it may be saved to a log file somewhere.

A more in-depth example

Let's look again at the example from before:

05 12 * * 0 /home/jdoe /home/jdoe/jobs/copy-to-partition

Let's dissect this a bit, as it will help when you're creating your own cron jobs. What is this output telling you? It is helpful to know what the fields of a "crontab" are. Here's a table with the order of fields, and their values:

MINUTE	HOUR	DAYOFMONTH	MONTH	DAYOFWEEK	COMMAND
0-59	0-23	1-31	1-12	0-6	filepath/command

Note

Order matters, and note that the first element is 0 for the minute, hour, and day of the week fields, while the day of the month and month fields begin at 1.

Knowing this, we can see that this "crontab" means:

At 12:05 every Sunday, every month, regardless of the day of the month, run the command copy-to-partition in the /home/jdoe/jobs directory.

Let's take another example and create a cron job that checks disk space available every minute, every hour, every day of the month, every month, for every day of the week, and outputs it to a file named :file:disk_space.txt.

* * * * * df -h > disk_space.txt

This would get us what we wanted (df -h is the unix command for checking free disk space).

Field values can also be ranges. Let's say you want to edit this job to run the same command (df -h), but instead of running every minute, you only want the job to run it in the first 5 minutes of every hour, every day of the month, every month, for every day of the week.

Running crontab -e again and changing the line to:

0-5 * * * * df -h > disk_space.txt

will get you what you want.

How do I remove a crontab?

Lastly, if you want to remove the command, again type crontab -e, and then delete the line with that job in it from the file in your editor.

To remove all cron jobs for the current user, type:

crontab -r

What are some common "cron expressions"?

The "cron expression" syntax can be confusing to understand. Here are some common expressions to get you started.

• * * * * *: every minute
• 0 * * * *: every hour, on the hour
• 0 0 * * *: every day at midnight server time
• 0 0 * * 0: every Sunday at midnight server time
• */10 * * * *: every ten minutes
• 0 */4 * * *: every four hours, on the hour

Advanced "crontab"

How do "cron expressions" work?

Here is the standard "cron expression" cheat sheet [1]:

# .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
# |   .------------- hour (0 - 23)
# |   |   .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# |   |   |   .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
# |   |   |   |  .----- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)  OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# |   |   |   |  |
# *   *   *   *  *  command to be executed

Put this template at the top of your crontab file so it'll be easy to remember what the fields do.

Notes on composing good "cron expressions"

• If you want to run something every N hours, be sure to specify a minute expression (the first number) also; otherwise, the command will be run once a minute for the entire hour.
• Commands run by cron won't have all of the configuration and environment variables that come from your shell initialization files (like .bashrc or .zshrc or such). In particular, make sure to specify the full path to your program if it's not in a commonly-used location like /usr/bin.

Modify a specific user's crontab

The crontab command can be used to view or modify a specific user's crontab file, instead of the current user's crontab file. For instance, if you are logged in as jdoe and you want to edit jsmith's crontab (and you have the permissions to do so), type the following in a shell:

jdoe@opsschool ~$ crontab -e -u jsmith

This option also combines with the other options we looked at before (-l for listing and -r for removing a user's crontab file).

Modifying crontab parameters

With some cron implementations [2], you can add shell environment variables to the top of a crontab file that affect all of the commands run by those crontabs. For example, you could modify the PATH, MAILTO, HOME, or any other variable.

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Footnotes

[1]	"Examples" in cron - Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia

[2]	Where can I set environment variables that crontab will use?,