I want to schedule a command every 1 hour and 1 minute. For example, if the first command executes at 01:01 pm, the next command will execute at 01:02PM; the time between the command executions is 1 hour and 1 minute.
I tried using
*/1 */1 * * *
but it runs every minute. Can anyone help me?
There's no way in crontab to schedule a job to run every 61 minutes (which, BTW, is an odd thing to want to do), but you can do it indirectly.
You can schedule a job to run every minute:
* * * * * wrapper_script
where wrapper_script invokes the desired command only if the current minute is a multiple of 61, something like this:
#!/bin/bash
second=$(date +%s)
minute=$((second / 60))
remainder=$((minute % 61))
if [[ $remainder == 0 ]] ; then
your_command
fi
This sets $minute to the number of minutes since the Unix epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. You can adjust when the command runs by using a value other than 0 in the comparison.
That's assuming you want it to run every 61 minutes (which is what you asked). But if you want to repeat in a daily cycle, so it runs at 00:00, 01:01, ..., 23:23, and then again at 00:00 the next day, you can do it directly in crontab:
0 0 * * * your_command
1 1 * * * your_command
2 2 * * * your_command
# ...
21 21 * * * your_command
22 22 * * * your_command
23 23 * * * your_command
You can use this method which tells it to run every 61 minutes after the cron job.
while true
do
# do stuff here every 61 minutes
sleep 61m
done
Another option:
Cron can easily run every hour, but 61 minutes is harder to achieve.
The normal methods include using a sleep command or various rather
elaborate methods in the script itself to fire off every 61 minutes.
A much simpler method is using cron's cousin, the at command. The at
command will run through a file and run all the commands inside, so
you just need to place the commands in a file, one per line, then add
this line to the bottom of the file:
at now + 61 minutes < file
The commands can be any type of one-liner you want to use.
Here is an example. Call this file foo and to kick off the execution
the first time, you can simply run: sh foo
date >> ~/foo_out
cd ~/tmp && rm *
at now + 61 minutes < ~/foo
That will output the date and time to ~/foo_out then move to a tmp
directory and clean out files, then tell the at command to run itself
again in 61 minutes which will again run the at command after
executing the rest.
Related
Some of my sites need regular crontabs, I use this to start a cronjob every 5 minutes "*/5 * * * *".
The crontabs are small, light, but there are starting to be several sites that need them, and starting them all together, it starts not being a very good idea.
With this "*/5" the cron starts at 5, 10, 15 20, etc... is it possible to make it start at, for example 8,13,18,23, etc?
Vixie cron accepts steps in a range (thanks Keith Thompson), so you can do
3-58/5 * * * * my_command
With other versions of cron, this may not be supported and you'd just have to do
3,8,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,53,58 * * * * my_command
Another option is something like
*/5 * * * * sleep 3m ; my_command
This could be adapted to sleep for a random time, thus further spreading out the jobs. For instance, you could do
*/5 * * * * /bin/bash -c 'sleep $((RANDOM/(32767/180))) ; my_command'
or use SHELL = /bin/bash further up in your crontab to make the /bin/bash -c unnecessary, if you're okay with using bash to run all the other cron jobs following the SHELL = line. $RANDOM in bash expands to a random integer between 0 and 32767, so this gets you a delay of up to 180 seconds.
I want to send emails to clients every day between 17:00 to 20:00. I want to run my command every 10 minutes in this period.
So the script will be executed 6 times per hour. That's a total of 18 times.
Is this possible with the crontab? How should I write the syntax?
I think this should work:
0/10 17-19 * * * <cmd>
or:
0/10 17,18,19 * * * <cmd>
I want a cronjob to run every one hour randomly. (i.e if the first job runs at 58 minutes,the second job should run at 47 minutes and the third one at 52 minutes and so on) But this should run randomly for everyone hour. Is there a way to do this?
You could run a job every hour, on the hour, that sleeps up to 3,599 seconds and then executes your script:
0 * * * * /path/to/perl -e 'sleep int rand 3600' && /path/to/yourScript
Or, using PHP if you prefer that to Perl:
0 * * * * /path/to/php -r 'sleep(rand(0,3599));' && /path/to/yourScript
You can find the path to Perl with:
which perl
likewise for PHP:
which php
Instead of using perl or even php, just use the BASH $RANDOM built in divided by 3600 which equals one hour like so.
0 * * * * sleep $((RANDOM%3600)) && /path/to/yourScript
Keep in mind that you will probably have some race conditions with a script sleeps randomly close to an hour depending on how long it takes for your script to execute.
For example I want to run job every 6 minutes between;
16:34 - 18:45
So it must be running on 16:34, 16:40, 16:46 etc. to 18:40.
When I write
34-45 16-18 * * *
It only works between 16:34-16:45 and 18:34-18:45. But I don't want this one.
Is it possible to make this?
Thank you
Hm, where in your cron line is the "every 6 minutes" part? Also, why would your cron go to 18:40, wouldn't 18:42 be the last time you want it to run? Let me know if I'm not understanding the question correctly.
Anyway though, not sure if it's possible in one cron line, but you could always do something like:
34/6 16 * * *
*/6 17 * * *
0,6,12,18,24,30,36,42 18 * * *
Edit: Or, if you have control and are able to edit the file/executable your cron is running you could do:
*/6 16-18 * * * /path/to/myScript
And then at the very beginning of myScript:
if time < 16:34 or time > 18:45:
exit # kill script
I want to set up a cron job which will execute a command every hour. However, I want that this command should be started at 10 A.M and should run every hour till 4 P.M. This job is to run daily between these times. The command is nothing but a call to a Perl script. Following crontab entry runs fine and invokes the script every hour
* */1 * * * cd path_to_file; perl file.pl > path_to_logs/log.txt
Is there a way to limit the timings of this cron job so that it runs only between 10 A.M and 4 P.M ?
man 5 crontab is your friend. (Your example does not do what you claim it does; /1 is the default skip and therefore redundant, and that spec therefore runs once per minute due to the leading * instead of 0.)
0 10-15 * * * your command here
(I used 15, because it occurs to me that "between 10 and 4" is an exclusive range so you don't want to run at 16:00.)
If you want the script to be run every hour you can do something like this:
[code]
00 10,11,12,13,14,15,16 * * * cd path_to_file; perl file.pl > path_to_logs/log.txt
[/code]
This means when the minutes hit 00 and the hour hits any of 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 the script will be run
In your Perl script (or in a wrapper for the Perl script), you can use localtime to check the hour and exit if it isn't between 10am and 4pm:
use strict;
use warnings;
my #lt=localtime;
my $hour=$lt[2];
unless($hour>=10 and $hour<=16)
{
print "Not between 10am and 4pm. Exiting.\n";
exit;
}
#put the rest of your code here.