Help with date and redhat 9

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Okay, here is how to do crontab...

First, make sure your favorite editor is specified in an
environment variable called "EDITOR" and also in one called
"VISUAL". When you run crontab with the -e option it will invoke
one or the other of those, I forget which! I use "ed" in mine,
but you might prefer another editor.

So now become root and do this:

crontab -e

Now you are your favorite editor, and you create a one line entry
consisting of five time specifiers and one command, all on one
line. The time specifiers are separated from each other by a
space and might be an asterisk. They are as follows:

specifier #1 is the minute, from 0 to 59.

specifier #2 is the hour, from 0 to 23

specifier #3 is the day of the month, from 1 to 31

specifier #4 is the month, from 1 to 12

specifier #5 is the day of the week, and I forget if this is 0 to
6 or 1 to 7.

So to execute a command say at half past seven every morning, you
would make the line look like this:

30 7 * * * the-command-goes-here

Be sure the 30 starts in column 1!

So what you must do is decide what time each day you want your
command to run, and make a line like the example. If 7:30 AM is
not convenient, pick another time and use the specifiers to say
when.

It is a good idea to redirect output from your command to
/dev/null, otherwise you get email to root! Also, you have to
supply the full path to your command, since no path is in effect
during the crontab execution.

When you have done all that, just save your work and exit, and
the rest is automatic.


Hope this helps.

Chuck




-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (3% of Full)
 Get my public key from website, http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh