Crontab specification

How to specify crontab jobs and some examples

crontab -e edit
crontab -l list

min hour dayofmonth monthofyear dayofweek command
0-59/2 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://my_site.com/cron.php  > /dev/null 2>&1

Append string >/dev/null 2>&1 to stop mail alert:
0 1 5 10 * /path/to/script.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
OR
0 1 5 10 * /path/to/script.sh &> /dev/null

Crontab syntax field allowed values based on Debian
----- --------------
1 Minute 0-59
2 Hour 0-23 (0 = midnight)
3 Day 1-31
4 Month 1-12
5 Weekday 0-6 (0 = Sunday)

Source: http://www.linuxweblog.com/crotab-tutorial

Examples:

This is how you can delay your cron jobs in crontab by adding the sleep command and the amount of seconds before the action is called. Can be used when you don't want to run cron jobs at the same time but needs to make calls more often than 1 minute.

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://sub.ahsaymonitor.com/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1
*/1 * * * * sleep 10; /hotel/ahsaymonitor.com/sub/runparser.sh
*/1 * * * * sleep 30; /hotel/ahsaymonitor.com/sub/runparser.sh
*/1 * * * * sleep 50; /hotel/ahsaymonitor.com/sub/runparser.sh
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