LINUX How to use crontab

Crontab

The crontab (cron derives from chronos, Greek for time; tab stands for table) command, found in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, is used to schedule commands to be executed periodically. To see what crontabs are currently running on your system, you can open a terminal and run:
sudo crontab -l
To edit the list of cronjobs you can run:
sudo crontab -e
This wil open a the default editor (could be vi or pico, if you want you can
change the default editor) to let us manipulate the crontab. If you save
and exit the editor, all your cronjobs are saved into crontab. Cronjobs are
written in the following format:  
* * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh 

Scheduling explained

As you can see there are 5 stars. The stars represent different date parts in the following order:
  • minute (from 0 to 59)
  • hour (from 0 to 23)
  • day of month (from 1 to 31)
  • month (from 1 to 12)
  • day of week (from 0 to 6) (0=Sunday)

Execute every minute

If you leave the star, or asterisk, it means every. Maybe that’s a bit unclear. Let’s use the the previous example again:
* * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh
They are all still asterisks! So this means execute /bin/execute/this/script.sh:
  • every minute
  • of every hour
  • of every day of the month
  • of every month
  • and every day in the week.
In short: This script is being executed every minute. Without exception.

Execute every Friday 1AM

So if we want to schedule the script to run at 1AM every Friday, we would need the following cronjob:
0 1 * * 5 /bin/execute/this/script.sh

Neat scheduling tricks

What if you’d want to run something every 10 minutes? Well you could do this:
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh 
Or crontab allows you to do this as well: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh

Storing the crontab output

By default cron saves the output of /bin/execute/this/script.sh in the user’s mailbox (root in this case). But it’s prettier if the output is saved in a separate logfile. Here’s how: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh >> /var/log/script_output.log 2>&1

Explained

Linux can report on different levels. There’s standard output (STDOUT) and standard errors (STDERR). STDOUT is marked 1, STDERR is marked 2. So the following statement tells Linux to store STDERR in STDOUT as well, creating one datastream for messages & errors:
 2>&1
Now that we have 1 output stream, we can pour it into a file. Where > will
overwrite the file, >> will append to the file. In this case we’d like to
to append:
>> /var/log/script_output.log

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LINUX Move and copy files using SSH

Often you will need to move one or more files/folders or copy them to a different location. You can do so easily using an SSH connection. The commands which you would need to use are mv (short from move) and cp (short from copy). The mv command syntax looks like this: mv configuration.php-dist configuration.php By issuing the above command we will move (rename) the file configuration.php-dist to configuration.php. You can also use mv to move a whole directory and its content: mv includes/* ./ This will move all files (and folders) in the includes/ directory to the current working directory. In some cases however, we will need to only update the files and move only files that were changed, which we can do by passing ‘ -u ’ as argument to the command: mv -u includes/* admin/includes The copy (cp) command works the same way as mv, but instead of moving the files/folders it copies them. For example: cp configuration.php-dist configuration.php The command will copy the co
Read more

PHP Predefined Variables

PHP provides a large number of predefined variables to any script which it runs.PHP provides an additional set of predefined arrays containing variables from the web server the environment, and user input. These new arrays are called superglobals: All the following variables are automatically available in every scope. PHP Superglobals: Variable Description $GLOBALS Contains a reference to every variable which is currently available within the global scope of the script. The keys of this array are the names of the global variables. $_SERVER This is an array containing information such as headers, paths, and script locations. The entries in this array are created by the web server. There is no guarantee that every web server will provide any of these. See next section for a complete list of all the SERVER variables. $_GET An associative array of variables passed to the current script via the HTTP GET method. $_POST An associative array of variable
Read more

Java : Variables Declaring

[1]. Java Variables Variables are containers for storing data values. In Java, there are different types of variables, for example: String - stores text, such as "Hello". String values are surrounded by double quotes int - stores integers (whole numbers), without decimals, such as 123 or -123 float - stores floating point numbers, with decimals, such as 19.99 or -19.99 char - stores single characters, such as 'a' or 'B'. Char values are surrounded by single quotes boolean - stores values with two states: true or false [2]. Declaring (Creating) Variables To create a variable, you must specify the type and assign it a value: Syntax type variable = value ; Where type is one of Java's types (such as int or String), and variable is the name of the variable (such as x or name). The equal sign is used to assign values to the variable. To create a variable that should store text, look at the following example: Example Create a variable called  name  of type  Stri
Read more