AIX

I want to schedule svmon -i 1 5 to run every 5 minutes and give output to a specific file. Can anybody help me to do this with cron?

First: what exactly do you want to achieve? It might be better suited to your needs to issue "svmon -G" instead, which gives you the "globals", aka summary of information instead of a momentary snapshot.

Second: The way you call svmon it has already an interval built in, so you do not need cron: "svmon -i 300" will take the snapshot every 300 seconds = 5 minutes for as long as you want. That might be, what you really want. In this case issue the following:

Code:

# nohup svmon -i 300 > /path/to/file &

and kill the process when you have take enough samples.

If you insist in taking 5 samples in a 1-second-interval every 5 minutes you need cron. Issue "crontab -e" (edit) as root and add the following line:

Code:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/svmon -i 1 5 > /path/to/file 2>/dev/null

see "man crontab" for an explanation of what the first part of the line means.