Set up a cron job

A cron job is a process that is automatically run at whatever time you set it to run. This can be each day, each hour of every day, every 5 minutes of every hour of every day.

Setting up a cron job can be a daunting task if you don't know what you're doing. It appears to be a lot harder than what it actually is. Hopefully, with the use of our generator and tips on how to get your cron job running, you will find it a lot easier.

determine how often you would like this process to run - which minute of which hour of which days
hold down the (ctrl) key to choose multiple values in the one select box
choose the times/days/months you would like to run the process. The checkbox below the hours/day selection is if you would like to run the process regularly, for instance, choose '5' and check the checkbox underneath to choose every 5 minutes.
if you want the process to run every day, don't choose anything from the 'day' list. Same for months - day of week - hours. A non-selection from a list will assume * all *

cron details

minutes:
'0' is the first minute, ie 2.00 as opposed to '1' being 2.01
NOTE: you MUST choose a minute here if you do not want the
cron to run EVERY MINUTE!

choose every minute

hours:
'0' is midnight, ie 12.00 am as opposed to '1' being 1.00 am
'22' is 10pm

choose every hour

day:
Choose whether you want the cron to run every day, every x days or the xth day of the month. As well as choosing a value here, you can choose a day of the week in the field further down and it will run on both that day and the days you select here.

choose every day

month:

day of week:
Choose the day of week if you wish to run the script on certain days, ie every Monday. If you have selected values in the 'days' field above, the command will run on both the xx day of the month as chosen, AND the day/days of the week you choose here

command to be executed:

Enter the command which you want to run. This can either be a path to a script, or a 'special' command. If you're not sure of the server path to a file/script, SSH or telnet into your server and navigate to the directory where the file is. Type 'pwd' at the command line, this will tell you the server path to the directory where the script is. Add the file name to the end of this, and that's what you use above.
You can enter a command directly instead of having this entry point to a script.

examples of entries in this field:
/home/myaccount/backup.cgi
perl /home/myaccount/backup.cgi
php /home/myaccount/clean_database.php
/home/myaccount/clean_database.php
/home/myaccount/monitor.sh
touch /tmp/file.lock
cp -Rfpud /home/myaccount /backup/myaccount/

send results to:

include errors in log

Sending any output from the script to /dev/null is basically sending it to a 'black hole'. If you don't need the results, then this is the best thing to do. If you want the output logged, enter the full server path of the log file here.

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