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Scheduling Commands with crontab

Apr 13, 2009  By Shawn Powers
 in
FAIL (the browser should render some flash content, not this).

Use crontab to schedule commands to run at specified intervals.

Download in .ogv format

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Cron issue

Fouad Bandarkar's picture
Submitted by Fouad Bandarkar (not verified) on Sun, 11/22/2009 - 01:18.

Need to schedule daily hot backup for Oracle Database.

I have followed the same proceure at all our clients, and the crontab works.

Wherein, at this client, the cron does not work.
When I run the command from ssh session, the backup completes successfully.
Is there any service which needs to be started at Linux level, etc in order for this schedule to run.

Looking forward to your help.

KAlarm

Madhukar Kedlaya's picture
Submitted by Madhukar Kedlaya (not verified) on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 20:33.

I use KAlarm which is a much better GUI based scheduler and alarm clock. I guess cron is useful if you need to save on memory and CPU.

cron writes output to your mail file

Fahd Shariff's picture
Submitted by Fahd Shariff (not verified) on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 16:18.

A useful thing to note is that if you do not redirect the stdout and/or stderr of your commands, any generated output or errors will be mailed to you.

You can look at your mail file (/var/mail/user) to see the output/errors of your commands.

This is true.

Shawn Powers's picture
Submitted by Shawn Powers on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 16:21.

Very true, and I meant to mention it. Thanks for pointing it out. Especially with that -v flag in rsync. :D

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

Personally I like using

Vadim's picture
Submitted by Vadim (not verified) on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 13:35.

Personally I like using gnome schedule (http://gnome-schedule.sourceforge.net) as a frontend for cron. Easier to go with if you don't know what are you doing.