[drupal-docs] cron jobs

[Ron Mahon]

Anisa
If you go to help-> system  under cron you will find a very good discussion
of the cron. 
if you can see the page it also tells you the proper path setting that you
can cut and paste
leaving only for you to input the frequency of when you want it to run. 
Ron
 
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  _____  

From: Anisa [mailto:mystavash at animecards.org] 
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 10:12 AM
To: drupal-docs at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [drupal-docs] cron jobs


OOooooooo, look what I found!

I recently asked my host about this cron thingy, and it turns out even I can
do it.  ;)

Here is their help file that breaks down what a cron job command line does:
=================


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 user name if this is the system crontab file, followed by a
command. 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). Note that this means that non-existant times, such as "missing
hours" during daylight savings conversion, will never match, causing jobs
scheduled during the "missing times" not to be run. Similarly, times that
occur more than once (again, during daylight savings conversion) will cause
matching jobs to be run twice.

cron(8) examines cron entries once every minute.



The time and date fields are:



       field          allowed values

       -----          --------------

       minute         0-59

       hour           0-23

       day of month   1-31

       month          1-12 (or names, see below)

       day of week    0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)



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
``/'' 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 cronfile. 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.

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 (ie, 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.

===================

I never knew.  ;)

Anisa.


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