Cron – Run cron job every 10 minutes, from 4:40 to 0:15

cron

I need to run a cron job every 10 minutes, only between 4:40 and 0:15. I've managed to schedule the cron job to run from 4 to 0 o'clock, but can't figure out how to schedule it further. This is what I came out with: */10 4-23,0 * * * script

Best Answer

Sometimes you just have to break out the ugly, and duplicate entries to get selection logic like that. It should work and be pretty apparent with what it's doing without uber cron-fu knowledge.

40,50 4 * * * script
*/10 5-23 * * * script
0,10 0 * * * script

Oh, and a helpful site for generating these: http://www.openjs.com/scripts/jslibrary/demos/crontab.php

Related Solutions

Cron – How to Prevent Duplicate Cron Jobs Running

There are a couple of programs that automate this feature, take away the annoyance and potential bugs from doing this yourself, and avoid the stale lock problem by using flock behind the scenes, too (which is a risk if you're just using touch). I've used lockrun and lckdo in the past, but now there's flock(1) (in newish versions of util-linux) which is great. It's really easy to use:

* * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/fcj.lockfile /usr/local/bin/frequent_cron_job

Cron Job – How to Run a Cron Job Manually and Immediately

Here's what I did, and it seems to work in this situation. At least, it shows me an error, whereas running from the command line as the user doesn't show the error.

Step 1: I put this line temporarily in the user's crontab:

* * * * *   /usr/bin/env > /home/username/tmp/cron-env

then took it out once the file was written.

Step 2: Made myself a little run-as-cron bash script containing:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/env -i $(cat /home/username/tmp/cron-env) "$@"

So then, as the user in question, I was able to

run-as-cron /the/problematic/script --with arguments --and parameters

This solution could obviously be expanded to make use of sudo or such for more flexibility.

Hope this helps others.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron – How to Prevent Duplicate Cron Jobs Running

Cron Job – How to Run a Cron Job Manually and Immediately

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