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CRONTAB(1)							    CRONTAB(1)

NAME
       crontab	- manipulate per-user crontabs (dillon's lightweight cron dae‐
       mon)

SYNOPSIS
       crontab file [-u user] - replace crontab from file

       crontab - [-u user] - replace crontab from stdin

       crontab -l [-u user] - list crontab for user

       crontab -e [-u user] - edit crontab for user

       crontab -d [-u user] - delete crontab for user

       crontab -c dir - specify crontab directory

DESCRIPTION
       crontab manipulates the per-user crontabs.

       Generally the -e option is used to edit your crontab.  crontab will use
       the  editor specified by your EDITOR or VISUAL environment variable (or
       /usr/bin/vi) to edit the crontab.

       crontab doesn't provide the kinds of  protections  that	programs  like
       visudo  do  against syntax errors and simultaneous edits.  Errors won't
       be detected until crond reads the crontab file.	What crontab  does  is
       provide	a mechanism for users who may not themselves have write privi‐
       leges to the crontab  folder  to	 nonetheless  install  or  edit	 their
       crontabs.   It  also  notifies a running crond daemon of any changes to
       these files.

       Only users who belong to the same group as the crontab binary  will  be
       able  to	 install  or edit crontabs.  However it'll be possible for the
       superuser to install crontabs even for users who don't have the	privi‐
       leges  to  install  them	 themselves.  (Even for users who don't have a
       login shell.)  Only the superuser may use the  -u  or  -c  switches  to
       specify a different user and/or crontab directory.

       The  superuser  also  has  his  or  her	own per-user crontab, saved as
       /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root.

       Unlike other cron daemons, this crond/crontab package doesn't try to do
       everything  under the sun.  It doesn't try to keep track of user's pre‐
       ferred shells; that would require special-casing users  with  no	 login
       shell.	Instead,  it  just runs all commands using /bin/sh.  (Commands
       can of course be script files written in any shell you like.)

       Nor does it do any special environment handling.	  A  shell  script  is
       better-suited  to doing that than a cron daemon.	 This cron daemon sets
       up only four environment variables: USER, LOGNAME, HOME, and SHELL.

       Our crontab format is roughly similar to that used by vixiecron.	 Indi‐
       vidual  fields  may  contain  a time, a time range, a time range with a
       skip factor, a symbolic range for the day of week and  month  in	 year,
       and  additional	subranges  delimited  with commas.  Blank lines in the
       crontab or lines that begin with a hash (#) are ignored.	 If you	 spec‐
       ify  both  a day in the month and a day of week, it will be interpreted
       as the Nth such day in the month.

       Some examples:

	      # MIN HOUR DAY MONTH DAYOFWEEK  COMMAND
	      # run `date` at 6:10 am every day
	      10 6 * * * date

	      # run every two hours at the top of the hour
	      0 */2 * * * date

	      # run every two hours between 11 pm and 7 am, and again at 8 am
	      0 23-7/2,8 * * * date

	      # run at 4:00 am on January 1st
	      0 4 1 jan * date

	      # run every day at 11 am, appending all output to a file
	      0 11 * * * date >> /var/log/date-output 2>&1

       To request the last Monday, etc.	 in a month, ask for  the  “5th”  one.
       This  will  always  match the last Monday, etc., even if there are only
       four Mondays in the month:

	      # run at 11 am on the first and last Mon, Tue, Wed of each month
	      0 11 1,5 * mon-wed date

       When the fourth Monday in a month is the last, it  will	match  against
       both  the “4th” and the “5th” (it will only run once if both are speci‐
       fied).

       The following formats are also recognized:

	      # schedule this job only once, when crond starts up
	      @reboot date

	      # schedule this job whenever crond is running, and sees that at least one
	      # hour has elapsed since it last ran
	      @hourly ID=job1 date

       The formats @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly,	and  @yearly  need  to
       update  timestamp  files	 when their jobs have been run.	 The timestamp
       files are saved as /var/spool/cron/cronstamps/user.jobname.  So for all
       of  these formats, the cron command needs a jobname, given by prefixing
       the command with ID=jobname.  (This syntax was chosen to	 maximize  the
       chance that our crontab files will be readable by other cron daemons as
       well.  They might just interpret the ID=jobname as a command-line envi‐
       ronment variable assignment.)

       There's	also  this esoteric option, whose usefulness will be explained
       later:

	      # don't ever schedule this job on its own; only run it when it's triggered
	      # as a "dependency" of another job (see below), or when the user explicitly
	      # requests it through the "cron.update" file (see crond(8))
	      @noauto ID=namedjob date

       There's also a format available for finer-grained control  of  frequen‐
       cies:

	      # run whenever it's between 2-4 am, and at least one day (1d)
	      # has elapsed since this job ran
	      * 2-4 * * * ID=job2 FREQ=1d date

	      # as before, but re-try every 10 minutes (10m) if my_command
	      # exits with code 11 (EAGAIN)
	      * 2-4 * * * ID=job3 FREQ=1d/10m my_command

       These  formats  also  update timestamp files, and so also require their
       jobs to be assigned IDs.

       Notice the technique used in the second example:	 jobs  can  exit  with
       code  11	 to indicate they lacked the resources to run (for example, no
       network was available), and so should be	 tried	again  after  a	 brief
       delay.  This works for jobs using either @freq or FREQ=... formats; but
       the FREQ=.../10m syntax is the only way to customize the length of  the
       delay before re-trying.

       Jobs  can  be  made to “depend” on, or wait until AFTER other jobs have
       successfully completed.	Consider the following crontab:

	      * * * * * ID=job4 FREQ=1d first_command
	      * * * * * ID=job5 FREQ=1h AFTER=job4/30m second_command

       Here, whenever job5 is up to be run, if job4 is scheduled to run within
       the  next 30 minutes (30m), job5 will first wait for it to successfully
       complete.

       (What if job4 doesn't successfully complete? If job4 returns with  exit
       code  EAGAIN,  job5 will continue to wait until job4 is retried—even if
       that won't be within the hour.  If job4 returns with any other non-zero
       exit code, job5 will be removed from the queue without running.)

       Jobs can be told to wait for multiple other jobs, as follows:

	      10 * * * * ID=job6 AFTER=job4/1h,job7 third_command

       The waiting job6 doesn't care what order job4 and job7 complete in.  If
       job6 comes up to be re-scheduled	 (an  hour  later)  while  an  earlier
       instance	 is  still waiting, only a single instance of job6 will remain
       in the queue.  It will have all of its “waiting flags” reset:  so  each
       of  job7	 and job4 (supposing again that job4 would run within the next
       1h) will again have to complete before job6 will run.

       If a job waits on a @reboot or @noauto job, the target job being waited
       on will also be scheduled to run.  This technique can be used to have a
       common job scheduled as @noauto that several other jobs depend on  (and
       so call as a subroutine).

       The  command  portion  of a cron job is run with /bin/sh -c ... and may
       therefore contain any valid Bourne shell command.  A common practice is
       to prefix your command with exec to keep the process table uncluttered.
       It is also common to redirect job output to a file or to /dev/null.  If
       you  do not, and the command generates output on stdout or stderr, that
       output will be mailed to the local user whose  crontab  the  job	 comes
       from.   If you have crontabs for special users, such as uucp, who can't
       receive local mail, you may want to create mail	aliases	 for  them  or
       adjust this behavior.  (See crond(8) for details how to adjust it.)

       Whenever	 jobs  return  an  exit code that's neither 0 nor 11 (EAGAIN),
       that event will be logged, regardless of whether any stdout  or	stderr
       is  generated.	The job's timestamp will also be updated, and it won't
       be run again until it would next be normally scheduled.	Any jobs wait‐
       ing on the failed job will be canceled; they won't be run until they're
       next scheduled.

TODO
       Ought to be able to have several crontab files for any given  user,  as
       an organizational tool.

SEE ALSO
       crond(8)

AUTHORS
       Matthew Dillon (dillon@apollo.backplane.com): original developer
       Jim Pryor (profjim@jimpryor.net): current developer

				  1 May 2011			    CRONTAB(1)
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