NAME
crontab
—
tables for driving cron
DESCRIPTION
A crontab
file contains instructions to
the cron(8) daemon of the general form: “at these times on these
dates run this command”. There may be a system
crontab
and each user may have their own
crontab
. Commands in any given
crontab
will be executed either as the user who owns
the crontab
or, in the case of the system
crontab
, as the user specified on the command
line.
While a crontab
is a text file, it is not
intended to be directly edited. Creation, modification, and removal of a
crontab
should be done using
crontab(1).
Blank lines, leading spaces, and tabs are ignored. Lines whose
first non-space character is a pound sign
(‘#
’) are comments, and are ignored.
Note that comments are not allowed on the same line as
cron(8) commands, since they will be taken to be part of the command.
Similarly, comments are not allowed on the same line as environment variable
settings.
An active line in a crontab
is either an
environment variable setting or a
cron(8) command.
Environment variable settings create the environment any command
in the crontab
is run in. An environment variable
setting is of the form:
name = value
The spaces around the equal sign
(‘=
’) are optional, and any subsequent
non-leading spaces in value will be part of the value
assigned to name. The value
string may be placed in quotes (single or double, but matching) to preserve
leading or trailing blanks.
Lines in the system crontab
have six fixed
fields plus a command, in the form:
While lines in a user crontab
have five
fixed fields plus a command, in the form:
Fields are separated by blanks or tabs. The command may be one or more fields long. The allowed values for the fields are:
field | allowed values |
minute | * or 0–59 |
hour | * or 0–23 |
day-of-month | * or 1–31 |
month | * or 1–12 or a name (see below) |
day-of-week | * or 0–7 or a name (0 or 7 is Sunday) |
user | a valid username |
command | text |
Lists are allowed. A list is a set of numbers (or ranges) separated by commas. For example, “1,2,5,9” or “0–4,8–12”.
Ranges of numbers are allowed. Ranges are two numbers separated with a hyphen. The specified range is inclusive. For example, 8–11 for an hour entry specifies execution at hours 8, 9, 10 and 11.
Step values can be used in conjunction with ranges. Following a range with /number specifies skips of number through the range. For example, “0–23/2” can be used in the hour field to specify command execution every other hour. Steps are also permitted after an asterisk, so to say “every two hours”, just use “*/2”.
An asterisk (‘*
’) is short
form for a range of all allowed values.
Names can be used in the month and day-of-week fields. Use the first three letters of the particular day or month (case doesn't matter). Ranges or lists of names are not allowed.
The command field (the rest of the line) is
the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a
newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh
or by the shell specified in the SHELL
variable of
the crontab
. Percent signs
(‘%
’) in the command, unless escaped
with a backslash (‘\
’), will be
changed into newline characters, and all data after the first
‘%
’ will be sent to the command as
standard input. If the command field begins with
‘-q
’, execution will not be logged.
Use whitespace to separate ‘-q
’ from
the command.
Commands are executed by cron(8) when the minute, hour, and month fields match the current time, and when at least one of the two day fields (day-of-month or day-of-week), match the current time.
Note: The day of a command's execution can be specified by two fields — day-of-month and day-of-week. If both fields are restricted (i.e. aren't *), the command will be run when either field matches the current time. For example,
30 4 1,15 * 5
would cause a command to be run at 4:30 am on the 1st and 15th of each month, plus every Friday.
Instead of the first five fields, one of eight special strings may appear:
string | meaning |
@reboot | Run once, at startup. |
@yearly | Run every January 1 (0 0 1 1 *). |
@annually | The same as @yearly. |
@monthly | Run the first day of every month (0 0 1 * *). |
@weekly | Run every Sunday (0 0 * * 0). |
@daily | Run every midnight (0 0 * * *). |
@midnight | The same as @daily. |
@hourly | Run every hour, on the hour (0 * * * *). |
ENVIRONMENT
HOME
- Set from the user's /etc/passwd entry. May be
overridden by settings in the
crontab
. LOGNAME
- Set from the user's /etc/passwd entry. May not be
overridden by settings in the
crontab
. MAILTO
- If
MAILTO
is defined and non-empty, mail is sent to the user so named. IfMAILTO
is defined but empty (MAILTO =
""), no mail will be sent. Otherwise mail is sent to the owner of thecrontab
. This is useful for pseudo-users that lack an alias that would otherwise redirect the mail to a real person. SHELL
- Set to /bin/sh. May be overridden by settings in
the
crontab
. USER
- Set from the user's /etc/passwd entry. May not be
overridden by settings in the
crontab
.
FILES
- /etc/crontab
- System crontab.
- /var/cron/tabs/⟨user⟩
- User crontab.
EXAMPLES
# use /bin/sh to run commands, no matter what /etc/passwd says SHELL=/bin/sh # mail any output to `paul', no matter whose crontab this is MAILTO=paul # # run five minutes after midnight, every day 5 0 * * * $HOME/bin/daily.job >> $HOME/tmp/out 2>&1 # run at 2:15pm on the first of every month -- output mailed to paul 15 14 1 * * $HOME/bin/monthly # run at 10 pm on weekdays, annoy Joe 0 22 * * 1-5 mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?% 23 0-23/2 * * * echo "run 23 minutes after midn, 2am, 4am ..., everyday" 5 4 * * sun echo "run at 5 after 4 every sunday"
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The crontab
file format is compliant with
the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification. The behaviours described below are all extensions to that
standard:
- The day-of-week field may use 7 to represent Sunday.
- Ranges may include “steps”.
- Months or days of the week can be specified by name.
- Logging can be suppressed with
‘
-q
’. - Environment variables can be set in a crontab.
- Command output can be mailed to a person other than the crontab owner, or the feature can be turned off and no mail will be sent at all.
- All of the ‘
@
’ commands that can appear in place of the first five fields.
AUTHORS
crontab
was written by
Paul Vixie
<vixie@isc.org>.