Blank lines and leading spaces and tabs are ignored. Lines whose first non-space character is a hash-sign (#) are comments, and are ignored. Note that comments are not allowed on the same line as cron commands, since they will be taken to be part of the command. Similarly, comments are not allowed on the same line as environment variable settings.
An active line in a crontab will be either an environment setting or a cron command. The crontab file is parsed from top to bottom, so any environment settings will affect only the cron commands below them in the file. An environment setting is of the form,
name = value
where the spaces around the equal-sign (=) are optional, and any subsequent non-leading spaces in value will be part of the value assigned to name. The value string may be placed in quotes (single or double, but matching) to preserve leading or trailing blanks. To define an empty variable, quotes must be used. The value string is not parsed for environmental substitutions or replacement of variables, thus lines like
PATH = $HOME/bin:$PATH
will not work as you might expect. And neither will this work
A=1
B=2
C=$A $B
There will not be any subsitution for the defined variables in the last value.
An alternative for setting up the commands path is using the fact that many shells will treat the tilde(~) as substitution of $HOME, so if you use bash for your tasks you can use this:
SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=~/bin:/usr/bin/:/bin
Several environment variables are set up automatically by the cron(8) daemon. SHELL is set to /bin/sh, and LOGNAME and HOME are set from the /etc/passwd line of the crontab's owner. PATH is set to "/usr/bin:/bin". HOME, SHELL, and PATH may be overridden by settings in the crontab; LOGNAME is the user that the job is running from, and may not be changed.
(Another note: the LOGNAME variable is sometimes called USER on BSD systems... on these systems, USER will be set also.)
In addition to LOGNAME, HOME, and SHELL, cron(8) will look at MAILTO if it has any reason to send mail as a result of running commands in ``this'' crontab. If MAILTO is defined (and non-empty), mail is sent to the user so named. MAILTO may also be used to direct mail to multiple recipients by separating recipient users with a comma. If MAILTO is defined but empty (MAILTO=""), no mail will be sent. Otherwise mail is sent to the owner of the crontab.
On the Debian GNU/Linux system, cron supports the pam_env module, and loads the environment specified by /etc/environment and /etc/security/pam_env.conf. It also reads locale information from /etc/default/locale. However, the PAM settings do NOT override the settings described above nor any settings in the crontab file itself. Note in particular that if you want a PATH other than "/usr/bin:/bin", you will need to set it in the crontab file.
By default, cron will send mail using the mail "Content-Type:" header of "text/plain" with the "charset=" parameter set to the charmap / codeset of the locale in which crond(8) is started up - ie. either the default system locale, if no LC_* environment variables are set, or the locale specified by the LC_* environment variables ( see locale(7)). You can use different character encodings for mailed cron job output by setting the CONTENT_TYPE and CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in crontabs, to the correct values of the mail headers of those names.
The format of a cron command is very much the V7 standard, with a number of upward-compatible extensions. Each line has five time and date fields, followed by a command, followed by a newline character ('\n'). The system crontab (/etc/crontab) uses the same format, except that the username for the command is specified after the time and date fields and before the command. The fields may be separated by spaces or tabs.
Commands are executed by cron(8) when the minute, hour, and month of year fields match the current time, and when at least one of the two day fields (day of month, or day of week) match the current time (see ``Note'' below). cron(8) examines cron entries once every minute. The time and date fields are:
A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for ``first-last''.
Ranges of numbers are allowed. Ranges are two numbers separated with a hyphen. The specified range is inclusive. For example, 8-11 for an ``hours'' entry specifies execution at hours 8, 9, 10 and 11.
Lists are allowed. A list is a set of numbers (or ranges) separated by commas. Examples: ``1,2,5,9'', ``0-4,8-12''.
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 specify command execution every other hour (the alternative in the V7 standard 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''.
Names can also be used for the ``month'' and ``day of week'' fields. Use the first three letters of the particular day or month (case doesn't matter). Ranges or lists of names are not allowed.
The ``sixth'' field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the crontab file. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input. There is no way to split a single command line onto multiple lines, like the shell's trailing "\".
Note: The day of a command's execution can be specified by two
fields --- day of month, and day of week. If both fields are
restricted (i.e., aren't *), the command will be run when
either
field matches the current time. For example,
``30 4 1,15 * 5''
would cause a command to be run at 4:30 am on the 1st and 15th of each
month, plus every Friday. One can, however, achieve the desired result
by adding a test to the command (see the last example in EXAMPLE CRON FILE
below).
Instead of the first five fields, one of eight special strings may appear:
Please note that startup, as far as @reboot is concerned, is the time when the cron(8) daemon startup. In particular, it may be before some system daemons, or other facilities, were startup. This is due to the boot order sequence of the machine.
The following lists an example of a user crontab file.
# use /bin/bash to run commands, instead of the default /bin/sh SHELL=/bin/bash # mail any output to `paul', no matter whose crontab this is MAILTO=paul # # run five minutes after midnight, every day 5 0 * * * $HOME/bin/daily.job >> $HOME/tmp/out 2>&1 # run at 2:15pm on the first of every month -- output mailed to paul 15 14 1 * * $HOME/bin/monthly # run at 10 pm on weekdays, annoy Joe 0 22 * * 1-5 mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?% 23 0-23/2 * * * echo "run 23 minutes after midn, 2am, 4am ..., everyday" 5 4 * * sun echo "run at 5 after 4 every sunday" # Run on every second Saturday of the month 0 4 8-14 * * test $(date +\%u) -eq 6 && echo "2nd Saturday"
The following lists the content of a regular system-wide crontab file. Unlinke a user's crontab, this file has the username field, as used by /etc/crontab.
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab # Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab' # command to install the new version when you edit this file # and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields, # that none of the other crontabs do. SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin # m h dom mon dow usercommand 17 * * * * root cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly 25 6 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily ) 47 6 * * 7 root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly ) 52 6 1 * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly ) #
Lists and ranges are allowed to co-exist in the same field. "1-3,7-9" would be rejected by AT&T or BSD cron -- they want to see "1-3" or "7,8,9" ONLY.
Ranges can include "steps", so "1-9/2" is the same as "1,3,5,7,9".
Months or days of the week can be specified by name.
Environment variables can be set in the crontab. In BSD or AT&T, the environment handed to child processes is basically the one from /etc/rc.
Command output is mailed to the crontab owner (BSD can't do this), can be mailed to a person other than the crontab owner (SysV can't do this), or the feature can be turned off and no mail will be sent at all (SysV can't do this either).
All of the `@' commands that can appear in place of the first five fields are extensions.
The crontab syntax does not make it possible to define all possible periods one could image off. For example, it is not straightforward to define the last weekday of a month. If a task needs to be run in a specific period of time that cannot be defined in the crontab syntaxs the best approach would be to have the program itself check the date and time information and continue execution only if the period matches the desired one.
If the program itself cannot do the checks then a wrapper script would be required. Useful tools that could be used for date analysis are ncal or calendar For example, to run a program the last Saturday of every month you could use the following wrapper code:
0 4 * * Sat [ "$(date +\%e)" = "`ncal | grep $(date +\%a | sed -e 's/.$//') | sed -e 's/^.*\s\([0-9]\+\)\s*$/\1/'`" ] && echo "Last Saturday" && program_to_run