·
The cron system is managed by the crondaemon. It gets information
about which programs and when they should run from the system's and users'
crontab entries. Only the root user has access to the system crontabs, while
each user should only have access to his own crontabs.
·
At system startup the cron daemon searches /var/spool/cron/ for
crontab entries which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd, it searches /etc/cron.d/
and it searches /etc/crontab, then uses this information every minute to check
if there is something to be done. It executes commands as the user who owns the
crontab file and mails any output of commands to the owner.
·
You could also use the crontab-l command to display crontabs.
·
Some variables are set, and after that there's the actual
scheduling, one line per job, starting with 5 time and date fields. The first
field contains the minutes (from 0 to 59), the second defines the hour of
execution (0-23), the third is day of the month (1-31), then the number of the
month (1-12), the last is day of the week (0-7, both 0 and 7 are Sunday). An
asterisk in these fields represents the total acceptable range for the field.
·
Lists are allowed; to execute a job from Monday to Friday enter
1-5 in the last field, to execute a job on Monday, Wednesday and Friday enter
1,3,5.
·
Keep in mind that output of commands, if any, is mailed to the
owner of the crontab file. If no mail service is configured, you might find the
output of your commands in your local mailbox, /var/spool/mail/<your_username>, a plain text file.
·
$ crontab -e
nocrontab for flash - using an empty one
##This script is to delete files and will run every 55th
minute ##
55 * * * * /home/ flash /scripting/delete