Hi,

I'm new to cron and i'm running the script through a command line (SSH)...

Everything works perfect when I execute the script manually. The script btw, is just a simple script that checks an email account for an email and forwards it to a mailing list. As I have no idea when the user will send a mail the the list, I need to check the account often (say every 15 minutes or so)

The script:

/usr/bin/perl /home/sites/<hide my address>/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/dada_bridge.pl >/dev/null 2>&1

when run manually works perfect but when I try time it by appending 15 * * * * to the script

15 * * * * /usr/bin/perl /home/sites/<hide my address>/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/dada_bridge.pl >/dev/null 2>&1

I tried to use the watch command and got bash: command not found when the script tried to execute

mojo.skazat.com/support/documentation/dada_bridge.pl.html should give an idea of what i'm about!

I'm lost here and my host provider can't help with such a tech question as it does not realate to an issue/problem with the server........


Thanks guys n gals

You have misunderstood the instructions on the site you've posted a link to. Double check the section titled "Set the cron job".

The line:

does NOT go in your script. It's a crontab entry. Put it in your crontab file. You don't add a line to your script to make it run every fifteen minutes; you add a line to your crontab file to make the cron daemon execute your script every fifteen minutes.

See the crontab manpage (man crontab). It will tell you how to edit the file (with crontab -e) as well as the syntax.

By the way, what you have already posted will not run once every 15 minutes, but rather once every time the minutes are equal to 15 (at 1:15, 2:15, 3:15, etc). You probably want this:
which will run once every fifteen minutes. Once again, the crontab manpage explains this WAY better than I can.

Hi,

Thanks for that! As it so happens, I do not have access to crontab on the server anyway as they don't allow permanent server side processes... Even if they only run once an hour

I'll try find a way around it