Cron Examples

Rakesh Jain

5 min readJul 30, 2020

How to write a crontab schedule expression for:

“At every minute.”
* * * * *

“At every 2nd minute.”
*/2 * * * *

every even minute
*/2 * * * *

At every 2nd minute from 1 through 59.
1–59/2 * * * *

“At every 3rd minute.”
*/3 * * * *

“At every 5th minute.”
*/5 * * * *

“At every 15th minute.”/every quarter hour
*/15 * * * *

“At every 30th minute.”/every half hour/“At every 30th minute.”
*/30 * * * *

every hour at 30 minutes
30 * * * *

every 60 minutes/“At minute 0.”/every hour/every one hour
0 * * * *

every other hour/“At minute 0 past every 2nd hour.”
0 */2 * * *

every three hour/“At minute 0 past every 3rd hour.”
0 */3 * * *

every 6 hours/“At minute 0 past every 6th hour.”
0 */6 * * *

every 12 hours/“At minute 0 past every 12th hour.”
0 */12 * * *

hour range/“At minute 0 past every hour from 9 through 17.”
0 9–17 * * *

between certain hours/“At minute 0 past every hour from 9 through 17.”
0 9–17 * * *

every day/daily/once a day/every night/every midnight/every day at midnight/every night at midnight/“At 00:00.”
0 0 * * *

every day at 1 am/“At 01:00.”
0 1 * * *

every day 8 am/“At 08:00.”
0 8 * * *

every morning/“At 09:00.”
0 9 * * *

every sunday/“At 00:00 on Sunday.”
0 0 * * SUN

every monday/“At 00:00 on Monday.”
0 0 * * MON

every friday at midnight/“At 00:00 on Friday.”
0 0 * * FRI

every weekday/weekdays only/monday to friday/“At 00:00 on every day-of-week from Monday through Friday.”
0 0 * * 1–5

every weekend/weekends only/“At 00:00 on Saturday and Sunday.”
0 0 * * 6,0

every seven days/weekly/every week/once a week/“At 00:00 on Sunday.”
0 0 * * 0

every month/monthly/once a month/“At 00:00 on day-of-month 1.”
0 0 1 * *

every other month/“At 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in every 2nd month.”
0 0 1 */2 *

every quarter/“At 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in every 3rd month.”
0 0 1 */3 *

every six months/“At 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in every 6th month.”
0 0 1 */6 *

every year/“At 00:00 on day-of-month 1 in January.”
0 0 1 1 *

Cron Tips

Tip 1: If the day-of-month or day-of-week part starts with a *, they form an intersection. Otherwise they form a union.
* * 3 * 1 runs on the 3rd day of the month and on Monday (union),
whereas * * */2 * 1 runs on every second day of the month only if it’s also a Monday (intersection).

Tip 2: Run your servers including the cron process in UTC timezone. Why?

Tip 3: Some cron implementations allow to specify years and seconds. However, cron is not the best tool if you need to operate at those levels, which is also why crontab.guru doesn’t support them.

Tip 4: Don’t use @reboot because it has too many issues.

Tip 5: More difficult schedules can be realised by combining multiple cron expressions. For example, if you need to run X every 90 minutes, create one crontab entry that runs X every 3 hours on the hour (0 */3 * * *), and a second crontab entry that runs X every 3 hours with an offset (30 1/3 * * *).

Tip 6: Another alternative for complicated schedules is Mcron.

Few Practical Examples ->

Execute the Full backup shell script (full-backup) on 10th June 08:30AM.

M H DM M DW CMD
30 08 10 06 * /home/test/full-backup

30–30th Minute
08–08 AM
10–10th Day
06–6th Month (June)
* — Every day of the week

2. Execute the specified incremental backup shell script (incremental-backup) at 11:00 and 16:00 on every day
M H DM M DW CMD
00 11,16 * * * /home/test/bin/incremental-backup

00 –0th Minute (Top of the hour)
11,16 –11 AM and 4 PM
* — Every day
* — Every month
* — Every day of the week

3. check the status of the database everyday (including weekends) during the working hours 9 a.m — 6 p.m

M H DM M DW CMD
00 9–18 * * * /home/test/bin/check-db-status

00–0th Minute (Top of the hour)
09–18–9 am, 10 am,11 am, 12 am, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm, 5 pm, 6 pm
* — Every day
* — Every month
* — Every day of the week

How to View Crontab Entries?

View Current Logged-In User’s Crontab entries and other user’s as well

To view your crontab entries type crontab -l from your unix account as shown below.

test@dev-db$ crontab -l
@yearly /home/test/annual-maintenance
*/10 * * * * /home/test/check-disk-space

[Note: This displays crontab of the current logged in user]root@dev-db# crontab -u test2 -l
@monthly /home/test2/monthly-backup
00 09-18 * * * /home/test2/check-db-status

How to Edit Crontab Entries?

Edit Current Logged-In User’s Crontab entries and other user’s as well

To edit a crontab entries, use crontab -e . By default this will edit the current logged-in users crontab.

test@dev-db$ crontab -e
@yearly /home/test/centos/bin/annual-maintenance
*/10 * * * * /home/test/debian/bin/check-disk-space
~
"/tmp/crontab.XXXXyjWkHw" 2L, 83C

[Note: This will open the crontab file in Vim editor for editing.
Please note cron created a temporary /tmp/crontab.XX... ]

When you save the above temporary file with :wq, it will save the crontab and display the following message indicating the crontab is successfully modified.

root@dev-db# crontab -u test2 -e
@monthly /home/test2/fedora/bin/monthly-backup
00 09-18 * * * /home/test2/ubuntu/bin/check-db-status
~
~
~
"/tmp/crontab.XXXXyjWkHw" 2L, 83C

How to Disable/Redirect the Crontab Mail Output using MAIL keyword?

By default crontab sends the job output to the user who scheduled the job. If you want to redirect the output to a specific user, add or update the MAIL variable in the crontab as shown below.

test@dev-db$ crontab -l
MAIL="test"@yearly /home/test/annual-maintenance
*/10 * * * * /home/test/check-disk-space[Note: Crontab of the current logged in user with MAIL variable]

If you wanted the mail not to be sent to anywhere, i.e to stop the crontab output to be emailed, add or update the MAIL variable in the crontab as shown below.

MAIL=""

Specify PATH Variable in the Crontab

All the above examples we specified absolute path of the Linux command or the shell-script that needs to be executed.

For example, instead of specifying /home/test/tape-backup, if you want to just specify tape-backup, then add the path /home/test to the PATH variable in the crontab as shown below.

test@dev-db$ crontab -lPATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/home/test@yearly annual-maintenance
*/10 * * * * check-disk-space[Note: Crontab of the current logged in user with PATH variable]

For more Best practices for cron please refer the below link -
https://www.endpoint.com/blog/2008/12/08/best-practices-for-cron

Hope you like the tutorial. Let me know your feedback in the response section.

Happy Learning!