crontab(5) - phpMan

CRONTAB(5) CRONTAB(5)

NAME
crontab - tables for driving cron

DESCRIPTION
A crontab file contains instructions to the cron(8) daemon of the general form: ``run this
command at this time on this date''. Each user has their own crontab, and commands in any
given crontab will be executed as the user who owns the crontab. Uucp and News will usu-
ally have their own crontabs, eliminating the need for explicitly running su(1) as part of
a cron command.

Blank lines and leading spaces and tabs are ignored. Lines whose first non-space charac-
ter is a hash-sign (#) are comments, and are ignored. Note that comments are not allowed
on the same line as cron 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 will be either an environment setting or a cron command. An
environment setting is of the form,

name = value

where 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.
The value string is not parsed for environmental substitutions, thus lines like

PATH = $HOME/bin:$PATH

will not work as you might expect.

Several environment variables are set up automatically by the cron(8) daemon. SHELL is
set to /bin/sh, and LOGNAME and HOME are set from the /etc/passwd line of the crontab's
owner. PATH is set to "/usr/bin:/bin". HOME, SHELL, and PATH may be overridden by set-
tings in the crontab; LOGNAME is the user that the job is running from, and may not be
changed.

(Another note: the LOGNAME variable is sometimes called USER on BSD systems... on these
systems, USER will be set also.)

In addition to LOGNAME, HOME, and SHELL, cron(8) will look at MAILTO if it has any reason
to send mail as a result of running commands in ``this'' crontab. If MAILTO is defined
(and non-empty), mail is sent to the user so named. If MAILTO is defined but empty
(MAILTO=""), no mail will be sent. Otherwise mail is sent to the owner of the crontab.

On the Debian GNU/Linux system, cron supports the pam_env module, and loads the environ-
ment specified by /etc/security/pam_env.conf. However, the PAM setting do NOT override
the settings described above nor any settings in the crontab file itself. Note in particu-
lar that if you want a PATH other than "/usr/bin:/bin", you will need to set it in the
crontab file.

By default, cron will send mail using the mail "Content-Type:" header of "text/plain" with
the "charset=" parameter set to the charmap / codeset of the locale in which crond(8) is
started up - ie. either the default system locale, if no LC_* environment variables are
set, or the locale specified by the LC_* environment variables ( see locale(7)). You can
use different character encodings for mailed cron job output by setting the CONTENT_TYPE
and CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in crontabs, to the correct values of the mail
headers of those names

The format of a cron command is very much the V7 standard, with a number of upward-compat-
ible extensions. Each line has five time and date fields, followed by a command, followed
by a newline character ('\n'). The system crontab (/etc/crontab) uses the same format,
except that the username for the command is specified after the time and date fields and
before the command. The fields may be separated by spaces or tabs.

Commands are executed by cron(8) when the minute, hour, and month of year 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 (see ``Note'' below). cron(8) examines cron entries once every
minute. 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''.

Ranges of numbers are allowed. Ranges are two numbers separated with a hyphen. The spec-
ified range is inclusive. For example, 8-11 for an ``hours'' entry specifies execution at
hours 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Lists are allowed. A list is a set of numbers (or ranges) separated by commas. Examples:
``1,2,5,9'', ``0-4,8-12''.

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''.

Names can also be used for 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 ``sixth'' field (the rest of the line) specifies 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 file. Percent-signs (%) in
the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters,
and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input. There is no
way to split a single command line onto multiple lines, like the shell's trailing "\".

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 once a year, "0 0 1 1 *".
@annually (same as @yearly)
@monthly Run once a month, "0 0 1 * *".
@weekly Run once a week, "0 0 * * 0".
@daily Run once a day, "0 0 * * *".
@midnight (same as @daily)
@hourly Run once an hour, "0 * * * *".

EXAMPLE CRON FILE
# use /bin/bash to run commands, instead of the default /bin/sh
SHELL=/bin/bash
# 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"

EXAMPLE SYSTEM CRON FILE
This has the username field, as used by /etc/crontab.
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of other the crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow user command
42 6 * * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
47 6 * * 7 root run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
52 6 1 * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly
#
# Removed invocation of anacron, as this is now handled by a
# /etc/cron.d file