cron
daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron)
see also :
crontab - run-parts
Synopsis
cron
[-f] [-l] [-L loglevel]
add an example, a script, a trick and tips
examples
source
How can I view results of my cron jobs?
The tasks cron is executing are responsible for their own
logging.
source
cron: run a process but only if it isnt running?
You could use a lock file in your script, but please see Process Management.
flock is one utility that can be
used.
source
Only email on cron errors for jobs in cron.daily, cron.hourly, etc
You should send successful email notifications to
/dev/null so they disappear.
But you want to see unsuccessful email notifications.
This means you need to first direct stdout to
/dev/null and then direct /dev/stderr
to stdout
try changing the redirection part of your cronjobs to
>/dev/null 2>&1
See this link
source
Run Linux script at time 'n' on first day, 'n+15 mins' next day, and so on
You can do this via cron.
You call the same cron script every day at the same time, but you
add a sleep statement to the start of the script that sleeps for
15m * date +'%j', this day of the year, [ 001 ...
366 ].
source
Difference between /etc/crontab and "crontab -e"
One is the system crontab and can only be edited by root, and the
other is the user crontab and can be edited by a user and exists
per user.
source
From what context is a cron task executed?
I bet you could just give the user a shell, just limit down the
ability to access it remotely and it's permissions.
Cron tasks run under the users who made the Cron task, so that's
why it runs as root.
source
How can I permanently fix my date synchronize problem in linux?
I had the same problem yesterday but under Slackware 8. To make a
long story short, I read a lot on google to finally reimage the
computer. My manager sent me that link but it did not fixed my issue.
I changed the local to UTC time. I changed the timezome to have
the good one I ln both.
Hope this will help you!
Also, you can try this:
ntpdate 0.pool.ntp.org
hwclock --systohc
source
what is run-parts in /etc/crontab, and how do I use it.
Basically,
run-parts(8) takes a directory as an argument.
It will run every script that is found in this directory. For
example, if you do a listing of /etc/cron.hourly,
you'll see that it's a directory where you can put executable
files to be run every hour.
As you can see, in cron it's used for convenience,
since you only have to specify one directory and everything in
that directory will be executed. This makes it easy to maintain
scripts in one of the etc/cron* directories.
See its manpage for more options that could be exploited for your
own use cases. You could for example do a simple check and show
which scripts would be run:
run-parts -v –test /etc/cron.hourly
source
Root account locked/suspended?
Okay, I've learned a bit about PAM and have found a solution.
Please note that this is not good practice in the general case,
but in the context of reliable embedded systems I believe it to
be acceptable.
My solution was to edit the cron specific file
/etc/pam.d/cron like so:
-@include common-account
+CONTENTS_OF_COMMON_ACCOUNT_FILE
and modify the following included line like so:
-account [success=1 new_authtok_reqd=done default=ignore] pam_unix.so
+account [success=1 new_authtok_reqd=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so
Cron jobs should now run even if the user's password needs to be
changed.
source
Auto suspend after X minutes to stop myself procrastinating
I found this script for a suspend timer with warnings. If
you would run this as a cronjob, all you would have to do for
snoozing is creating a launcher (or whatever you wm calls it, a
link on the desktop, taskbar, wherever you want it) that restarts
the current job (with 30 min timer) and execute the script once
with a two minute timer.
source
linux: how to run a command in a given directory
Your question makes little sense. Use cd. If you ask
for the answer not to use cd because you've tried it
and it didn't work, it's likely you didn't enter it correctly in
the crontab.
The simplest way would be to write a small shell script that will
cd and run your main task, then cron the script.
source
Verify that a cron job has completed
/var/log/cron
you can check to if its currently running with:
ps aux
source
Cron job once a minute for one hour a day
Sure:
*/1 4 * * * /home/scripts/my_job.sh
That tells it to run every minute during the 4 AM hour.
source
Problem with $RANDOM in crontab
cron typically runs with a less "full" environment,
meaning that you simply don't have many of the same environment
variables available to you. Apparently $RANDOM is
one such, and in fact your sleep command is simply
failing with an error because of the undefined variable -- which
is why your command failed to run at all when you switched to
&& instead of ;. (Well, actually,
$RANDOM is a Bash function, but cron
doesn't run in a full Bash environment, which evidently lacks
this function.)
To accomplish this task, you will need to use a separate Bash
script, as you said. Alternatively, you might be able to figure
out a way to use cat /dev/urandom directly in the
cron command, but it would probably be easier just
to move what you currently have to a separate Bash script.
description
cron is
started automatically from /etc/init.d on entering
multi-user runlevels.
options
-f
Stay in foreground mode,
don’t daemonize.
-l
Enable LSB compliant names for /etc/cron.d files. This
setting, however, does not affect the parsing of files under
/etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly or
/etc/cron.monthly.
-L loglevel
Tell cron what to log about
jobs (errors are logged regardless of this value) as
the sum of the following values:
1
will log the start of all cron jobs
2
will log the end of all cron jobs
4
will log all failed jobs (exit status != 0)
8
will log the process number of all cron jobs
The default is
to log the start of all jobs (1). Logging will be disabled
if levels is set to zero (0). A value of fifteen (15)
will select all options.
debian specific
Debian introduces some changes to cron that were not
originally available upstream. The most significant changes
introduced are:
—
Support for /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} via
/etc/crontab,
—
Support for /etc/cron.d (drop-in dir for package crontabs),
—
PAM support,
—
SELinux support,
—
auditlog support,
—
DST and other time-related changes/fixes,
—
SGID crontab(1) instead of SUID root,
—
Debian-specific file locations and commands,
—
Debian-specific configuration (/etc/default/cron),
—
numerous other smaller features and fixes.
Support for /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly
and /etc/cron.monthly is provided in Debian through the default
setting of the /etc/crontab file (see the system-wide example in
crontab(5)). The default sytem-wide crontab contains four
tasks: run every hour, every day, every week and every month.
Each of these tasks will execute run-parts providing each
one of the directories as an argument. These tasks are disabled
if anacron is installed (except for the hourly task) to
prevent conflicts between both daemons.
As described above, the files under these directories have to be
pass some sanity checks including the following: be executable,
be owned by root, not be writable by group or other and, if
symlinks, point to files owned by root. Additionally, the file
names must conform to the filename requirements of
run-parts: they must be entirely made up of letters,
digits and can only contain the special signs underscores (’_’)
and hyphens (’-’). Any file that does not conform to these
requirements will not be executed by run-parts. For
example, any file containing dots will be ignored. This is done
to prevent cron from running any of the files that are left by
the Debian package management system when handling files in
/etc/cron.d/ as configuration files (i.e. files ending in
.dpkg-dist, .dpkg-orig, and .dpkg-new).
This feature can be used by system administrators and packages to
include tasks that will be run at defined intervals. Files
created by packages in these directories should be named after
the package that supplies them.
Support for /etc/cron.d is included in the cron daemon
itself, which handles this location as the system-wide crontab
spool. This directory can contain any file defining tasks
following the format used in /etc/crontab, i.e. unlike the user
cron spool, these files must provide the username to run the task
as in the task definition.
Files in this directory have to be owned by root, do not need to
be executable (they are configuration files, just like
/etc/crontab) and must conform to the same naming convention as
used by run-parts(8): they must consist solely of upper-
and lower-case letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens. This
means that they cannot contain any dots. If the -l
option is specified to cron (this option can be setup
through /etc/default/cron, see below), then they must conform to
the LSB namespace specification, exactly as in the
--lsbsysinit option in run-parts.
The intended purpose of this feature is to allow packages that
require finer control of their scheduling than the
/etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} directories to add a
crontab file to /etc/cron.d. Such files should be named after the
package that supplies them.
Also, the default configuration of cron is controlled by
/etc/default/cron which is read by the init.d script that
launches the cron daemon. This file determines whether
cron will read the system’s environment variables and
makes it possible to add additional options to the cron
program before it is executed, either to configure its logging or
to define how it will treat the files under /etc/cron.d.
environment
If configured in /etc/default/cron in Debian systems, the
cron daemon localisation settings environment can be
managed through the use of /etc/environment or through the
use of /etc/default/locale with values from the latter
overriding values from the former. These files are read and they
will be used to setup the LANG, LC_ALL, and LC_CTYPE environment
variables. These variables are then used to set the charset of
mails, which defaults to ’C’.
This does NOT affect the environment of tasks running
under cron. For more information on how to modify the environment
of tasks, consult crontab(5)
The daemon will use, if present, the definition from
/etc/timezone for the timezone.
The environment can be redefined in user’s crontab definitions
but cron will only handle tasks in a single timezone.
notes
cron searches its spool area (/var/spool/cron/crontabs)
for crontab files (which are named after accounts in
/etc/passwd); crontabs found are loaded into memory. Note that
crontabs in this directory should not be accessed directly - the
crontab command should be used to access and update them.
cron also reads /etc/crontab, which is in a slightly
different format (see crontab(5)). In Debian, the content
of /etc/crontab is predefined to run programs under
/etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and
/etc/cron.monthly. This configuration is specific to Debian, see
the note under DEBIAN SPECIFIC below. in order
Additionally, in Debian, cron reads the files in the
/etc/cron.d directory. cron treats the files in
/etc/cron.d as in the same way as the /etc/crontab file (they
follow the special format of that file, i.e. they include the
user field). However, they are independent of
/etc/crontab: they do not, for example, inherit environment
variable settings from it. This change is specific to Debian see
the note under DEBIAN SPECIFIC below.
Like /etc/crontab, the files in the /etc/cron.d directory are
monitored for changes. In general, the system administrator
should not use /etc/cron.d/, but use the standard system crontab
/etc/crontab.
/etc/crontab and the files in /etc/cron.d must be owned by root,
and must not be group- or other-writable. In contrast to the
spool area, the files under /etc/cron.d or the files under
/etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and
/etc/cron.monthly may also be symlinks, provided that both the
symlink and the file it points to are owned by root. The files
under /etc/cron.d do not need to be executable, while the files
under /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and
/etc/cron.monthly do, as they are run by run-parts (see
run-parts(8) for more information).
cron then wakes up every minute, examining all stored
crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the
current minute. When executing commands, any output is mailed to
the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO
environment variable in the crontab, if such exists). The
children copies of cron running these processes have their name
coerced to uppercase, as will be seen in the syslog and ps
output.
Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool
directory’s modtime (or the modtime on the /etc/crontab
file) has changed, and if it has, cron will then examine
the modtime on all crontabs files and reload those which have
changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a
crontab file is modified. Note that the crontab(1) command
updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a
crontab.
Special considerations exist when the clock is changed by less
than 3 hours, for example at the beginning and end of daylight
savings time. If the time has moved forwards, those jobs which
would have run in the time that was skipped will be run soon
after the change. Conversely, if the time has moved backwards by
less than 3 hours, those jobs that fall into the repeated time
will not be re-run.
Only jobs that run at a particular time (not specified as
@hourly, nor with ’*’ in the hour or minute specifier) are
affected. Jobs which are specified with wildcards are run based
on the new time immediately.
Clock changes of more than 3 hours are considered to be
corrections to the clock, and the new time is used immediately.
cron logs its action to the syslog facility ’cron’, and
logging may be controlled using the standard syslogd(8)
facility.
see also
crontab ,
crontab, run-parts
author
Paul Vixie
<paul[:at:]vix[:dot:]com> is the author of cron and
original creator of this manual page. This page has also
been modified for Debian by Steve Greenland, Javier
Fernandez-Sanguino and Christian Kastner.