I've looked through plenty of cron job tutorials and I've gotten a great feel for how to run a cron job at 4 pm every day or on the 10th of every month but I haven't found anyone that will tell me how to run something every other week or every 3rd hour. I found this in a tutorial

*/5 * * * * ~/bashpodder/bashpodder.sh

which says that it runs every five minutes. Does this mean I can use the '/' operator to specify every other month like */2. I also saw something that said you can write sun, mon etc.

I guess what I'm really looking for is a complete explanation of what the parser is looking for and what is allowed in each of the first 5 arguments.

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?crontab+5

The above link is to a cron man page.

"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 spec-
ify command execution every other hour (the alternative in the V7 stan-
dard 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''."

With the above quote from the site, it will give you a better idea of how to proceed.

Good luck.

Thanks that was very helpful. Like other linux noobs I haven't quite learned to decode the man pages effectively all the time and rely more on forums. I've now got it working and understand completely my options.

http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?st...50103223643995

Some cron guides for good understanding.

Gentoo