HI,

how to run crontab every 2 days???

0 0 2 * * will work?

That will run the command on the second day of the month, not every two days.

The crontab fields are:
minute : 0-59
hour : 0-23
day-of-month : 0-31
month-of-year: 1-12
day-of-week : 0-6
(0=Sun, 1=Mon, 2=Tue, 3=Wed, 4=Thu, 5=Fri, 6=Sat)

So, the closest to running the job every two days would be:
0 0 0 0 2,4,6 <command>

which would run the job every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

What about this?
Two things to note:

1. With varying end-of-month days you might get only 1 day between runs sometimes... /2 means every two days, so if the range is 1-31, that would be 1,3,5 ... 31 and then the job would run again on the first of the next month, only one day later.

2. I don't know if the "/" syntax is respected by all implementations of cron however. Check the crontab manual page in section 5 of the manual, i.e. to find out, do command:

Oops, I didn't read far enough into the man page. The /2 (called 'stepping') should run the job at two day intervals, beginning on the second day of the month.

For months with an even number of days, that would work. For months with an odd number of days, that would probably result in a three day interval before the job runs again.

I'm not sure if /2 stepping on month day will end up with runs on 2, 4, 6 ... or 1, 3, 5 ...

The manual page is a little ambiguous about this. From the manual page it is clear that a range of 0-n/2 will result in even numbers 0, 2, 4, ... n; and for a range 1-n/2 there will be runs at 1,3,5 ... n.

What the * means is not well defined. For minutes in an hour it does state that */2 will start at 0, but there is never a day 0 of the month, so maybe */2 would mean 1,3,5... in that case. Only an experiment or examination of the source will tell. It may even vary according to which cron implementation is being used.

If someone knows for sure, either by looking at the source, or by an experiment, please post. If you do, please also post the cron implementation and version.

I use the default cron which comes with Ubuntu 7.04, and that is anacron 2.3. With this version using a day-of-month vale of */2 ran today - an odd-numbered day.

Perhaps to avoid this ambiguity, you should use "1-31/2" instead of "*/2".