I am trying to understand crontabs - cron

I set up a crontab to send an email out. All of a sudden the email kept sending like crazy when the time came.
I wanted it to go out at 5am on the 2nd of the month.
This is what it was set to : * 5 2 * *
But I'm pretty sure that's not what that does. Can anyone explain what that does instead?
I then went to copy another crontab that was relatively similar and made this :
0 5 */2 * *
Which I'm pretty sure is what I'm looking for.

Your spec
* 5 2 * *
means every minute after 5 on the 2nd day of every month. The other spec
0 5 */2 * *
means at 5:00 on every second day of every month, so it isn't what you want either.
You should simply fix the minute spec to something, doesn't have to be zero, but can't be an '*' or you'll get 60 emails between 5 and 6. You can do it like this:
0 5 2 * *
meaning at 5:00 on the 2nd day of every month or
10 5 2 * *
meaning at 5:10 on the 2nd day of every month.

Related

Cron schedule expression for running every 30 mins for first 7 days of every month, every two hours after that

So far I have this: 0 */30 0 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 * ? but not sure how to express every two hours after that.
It would look something like that:
*/30 * 1-7 * * command
* */2 8-31 * * command
Where the first cron runs every 30 minutes for the first 7 days of the month, and the second one runs every 2 hours from day 8 onwards.

modify a cronjob to make it run every half an hour starting next month

I have the following cronjob which runs every 30 min, and i want to change it to make it run every half an hour starting from next month(September). I need to change it because it is overriding some changes I am doing
0,30 * * * * /usr/bin/iga-chef-client -s 2 >> /var/chef...
should it be this way:
0,30 * * 9 *.....
this runs every 30 minutes starting from the month of September, but i am not sure if it is the correct way to put it.
Thanks in advance

I need a specific Quartz cron expression

I need a cron expression that will fire every second day excluding weekends.
Example:
The schedule starts on Monday. The schedule continues in the following manner:
(1st week) Monday>Wednesday>Friday
(2nd week) Tuesday>Thursday
(3rd week) Monday>Wednesday>Friday
(4th week) Tuesday>Thursday
Is that possible using only cron? I know a solution would be to run it every day and when it runs on weekend 'manually' prevent it from running.
Maybe something like could help...
* * 1-31/2 * mon-fri command.sh
That means, "At every minute on every 2nd day-of-month from 1 through 31 and on every day-of-week from Monday through Friday."
https://crontab.guru/#__1-31/2_*_mon-fri
http://corntab.com/?c=__1-31/2_*_MON-FRI
(Didn't tried on real machine)
I will consider extended expression format so your query will looks like:
S M H DoM M DoW Y
0 0 10 1-31 * 1#1,3#1,5#1 *
This query can be understood as: Repeat at 10:00:00 every day of every month where day of week is (monday, wednesday, friday) and it's first week of month.
You would define such 4 queries (i'm considering that 1 in 1#3 is just monday and 3 is week number in month):
1.) 0 0 10 1-31 * 1#1,3#1,5#1 *
2.) 0 0 10 1-31 * 2#2,4#2 *
3.) 0 0 10 1-31 * 1#3,3#3,5#3 *
4.) 0 0 10 1-31 * 2#4,4#4 *
which runs the same command. But it won't work becouse of limitations of most of evaluators (as i guess).
If you are familiar with .NET, I made evaluator which handle such expressions correctly, but it's only evaluator so what you only receive are dates when your event should occur. There is no job sheduler integrated with it. Click

How to set a Cron job in Every two hour from 10-19

I had a question before 1 month regarding this. that was the interval of 1 hour and i got exact answer. below is the link to the old question
How to set a Cron job in Every one hour from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm ( Monday to Friday )
Thank you Stack Over Flow and the contributor Andy Holmes
Now I got a new requirement on Cron expression, the same way i need it in every 2 hour.
I have tried
0 9/2-18/2 * * 1-5
and
0 (9-18)/2 * * 1-5
But that doesn't help, Please help me
Use:
0 10-18/2 * * 1-5
You specify the hour range 9-18 and then /2 to mean step by 2 hours. The man page explains this pretty clearly:
Step values can be used in conjunction with ranges. Following a range with /<number> specifies skips of the number's value through the range. For example, 0-23/2 can be used in the hours field to specify command execution every other hour (the alternative in the V7 standard is 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22). Steps are also permitted after an asterisk, so if you want to say "every two hours", just use */2.
If your interface doesn't allow this shorthand, you have to list them out by hand:
0 10,12,14,16,18 * * 1-5

setting Cronjobs in exact time

i want to set a cronjob in directadmin control panel and i have a question. if i set a job in this format:
05 21 * * * /home/backup.sh
my script will run only one time in a day at 21:05 OR every 5 miutes(12 times in an hour) and every day at 21:00 ?? i want to my cronjobs run's only one time in a day at 21:05! please help me
Your script will run at 21:50 every day.
See the file formats manpage for crontab:
$ man 5 crontab
The line parts before the command for your crontab are: (Below is from the manpage.)
The time and date fields are:
field allowed values
----- --------------
minute 0-59
hour 0-23
day of month 1-31
month 1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for "first-last".
And you will see this example even further below: (Below is also from the manpage.)
# run five minutes after midnight, every day
5 0 * * * $HOME/bin/daily.job >> $HOME/tmp/out 2>&1
man is your friend.
As per the cronjob set by you the first * means minutes, second * means Hour, third * means month, fourth * means day of the month and last * means day of the week. So if you set by
5 21 * * * it would run the job at 9:05pm minutes only.
For more about cronjob check http://www.thesitewizard.com/general/set-cron-job.shtml
Thanks & Regards,
Alok Thaker

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