heheh. I started a cron thread ages ago, but gave up in frustration before I could fix it.

So any way, I would like to ask someone to guide me through this step by step.

**********Here's what I know:********************
1)the format of dates..
2)I have a cron.allow and cron.deny file.

**********Here's what I don't know:**************
3)what to name the file (what extension)
4)where to put it
5)do I need to edit crontab?

anything not here I don't know, so tell me.

titanium_geek

The nake of the file doesn't matter nor does the location.

I would create a directory called "cron" in the home dir of the user it will be run as:
/root/cron

In that put:
/root/cron/jobs
/root/cron/logs

I put all my scripts in the jobs directory and output the logs to the logs directory (same name as the job with a .log extension)

In the /root/cron dir I create my cron files. If there is only one server it is usually "cron.standard" if it is a 2 system failover "cron.master" and "cron.slave". To load a crontab file (eg cron.standard) run:
crontab /root/cron/cron.standard

You cna check that it has loaded using:
crontab -l

I have only dealt with CRON on Solaris, but I ran into lots of problems with extra spaces and newlines in my cronfile. Be careful about them, seems that cron is sensitive to them. Especially newlines after your line

* 1 * 12 *

*david_ross* thanks. will try it out.
Oh, and how do you make sure that jobs go to "jobs" and logs go to "logs"?

*CodeWarrior* no, I don't think this is the problem... thanks though.

titanium_geek

That is just where you put the files. So a cron file say "cron.standard" could be:
0 * * * * /root/cron/jobs/backup.pl 2>&1 > /root/cron/logs/backup.log

Ok, so, I have this cron file. I call it cron.mine (?) and put it in cron/jobs. It says:
0 10 * * /root/cron/jobs mail -s pengun "It's 10 o'clock" root
to let it email me whenever it's 10 o'clock. (tell me if i'm right.)
oh, and would it email to user penguin or user root?

titanium_geek

If you are setting it up the way I suggested it would be the file:
/root/cron/cron.mineI only use the jobs directory for puting the actual scripts in. If is is only a one liner then I wouldn't bother with a script.

This is only the way I do it because I find it easy to use regardless of the user.

thanks. makes more sense than any book or howto. so, how do I get it to recognise it's a cron comand thingy? if I just put it there will it work?

titanium_geek

No you will need to load the crontab file:
crontab /root/cron/cron.mine

You can check it has loaded using a listing:
crontab -l

Ah ha! finaly it looks like I can start to regrow my hair (after pulling it all out)

just checking: the full directory for /root/cron is /home/penguin/root/cron (??)

thankyou thankyou thankyou

titanium_geek

The example I was giving was if you were wanting the jobs to run as root. If it is to be run as another user eg yourself I would use:
/home/penguin/cron
/home/penguin/cron/jobs
/home/penguin/cron/logs

I always put the cron dir under the users home directory.

yay! yay!

sadly, I just killed(ish) my linux drive... must reformat
NEVER delete things as root unless it's one thing and you must read it carefully, never just say y y y y y y to "do you wanna delete this?" because bad things happen..

ohwell

titanium_geek