I'm running RedHat 7.3 and have a backup job that is scheduled to run every night. I think the window is too small for the entire job to complete, so I'd like to kick it off earlier. I didn't write the script, and I'm not sure where to find the actual cron file that tells it what time to kick off....Can anyone help? Thanks.

'cron -e' usually does the trick. It will open your "default" text editor (usually vi or pico) so that you can edit your cron jobs.

all cronjob times or schedules will begin with /etc/crontab. This file is editable with any standard text editor.

This a pretty well writen doc on crontab and scheduling.

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kghose/Personal/linuxhowto.html

Ed

Doing a backup job in the night is usually done by writing a small shell script .. i used to do that , anyway i donot know what procedure you are going to follow , anyway you need to have a script atleast if you are not trying to do it through system calls, anyway abt firing that script you need to write a cron , when you are logged into ur login , issue crontab -e .. this will open a file looking very much like a file in vi editor ... write

0 22 * * * /path/to/your/script_of_backup this means the backup script will run every day , every week , every month at exactly 22:hrs in the night ....

Be careful with crontab -r .. it deletes without a warning

abt some informal discussion ... the general syntax of writing this :

(minutes) (hrs) (day_of_month) (month) (day_of_week) which takes inputs in the form (0-59) (0-23) (1-31) (1-12) (0-6) respectively


Thus :

0 1 * * 1-5 command (will run every monday-friday at 1 am)
0 1 * * 1,3,5 command (will run every mon,wed,fri at 1 am)
10 2 1 * * command (will run at 2:10 am on the first of every month)
0 1 1 1 * command (will run at 1 am on January 1 every year)

Just pure calculation nothing else .. do let me know if it works
Best of luck

Shaheen