Linux crontab cron job scheduling tips

The crontab

The crontab command has several options.

Option	Purpose
-e	edit the current crontab file using the text editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable or the VISUAL environment variable
-l	list the current crontab file
-r	remove the current crontab file
-u	specifies the user?s crontab to be manipulated. This is usually used by root to manipulate the crontab of other users or can be used by you to correctly identify the crontab to be manipulated if you have used the su command to assume another identity.

Options for the crontab command

crontab can also accept a file name and will use the specified file to create the crontab file. Many users prefer to use this option rather than the crontab -e command because it provides a master file from which the crontab is built, thus providing a backup to the crontab. The following example specifies a file called mycron.tab to be used as the input for crontab.

$ crontab mycron.tab

Here?s how you would use the crontab ?l command to view the current cron entries for the logged in user.

$ crontab -l

#**********************************************************
# Run the Weekly file cleanup task at 6:00AM every Monday
# and send any output to a file called cleanup.lst in the
# /tmp directory
#**********************************************************
00 06 * * 1 /home/terry/cleanup.ksh > /tmp/cleanup.lst

#**********************************************************
# Run the Weekly Management Report every Monday at 7:00 AM
# and save a copy of the report in my /home directory
#**********************************************************
00 07 * * 1 /home/terry/weekly_mgmt_rpt.ksh wprd > /home/terry/weekly_mgmt_rpt.lst

Now if we wanted to delete all the entries in the crontab we can use the ?r option.

$ crontab -r

The Format of the crontab File

The crontab file consists of a series of entries specifying what shell scripts to run and when to run it. It is also possible to document crontab entries with comments. Lines which have a pound sign (#) as the first non-blank character are considered comments. Blank lines are completely ignored. Comments cannot be specified on the same line as cron command lines. Comments must be kept on their own lines within the crontab.

There are two types of command lines that can be specified in the crontab: environment variable settings and cron commands. The following sections will provide more detail on these two types of crontab entries.