HowTo - cron

cron is a background process (a daemon) that wakes up every minute & checks crontab files for tasks to run. These files might belong to root or to individual user accounts on the machine.

The crontab file

For details about how to create crontab entries, see:

• man 5 crontab
• Crontab Syntax Tutorial

Editing your personal crontab file:

• crontab -e

Editing the root crontab file:

• sudo crontab -e

starting/stopping/restarting

• sudo service cron start
• sudo service cron stop
• sudo service cron restart

logs

cron logs are rolled into syslog

• grep CRON /var/log/syslog