UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

Could some one help to so that I can set up a cron job such that it will check the changes of a particular network folder???

What types of changes?
How often do you NEED to check? -- if it is more often than once a minute, you can't use cron to schedule it.

What have you written so far?

Hello Jim,

Thank you for your reply.There is a script which backs up all xen-servers to a specified folder on network. I would like to use cron to check if backups are done on daily basis, if that is possible. To be honest, I have not used cron before but I am just trying to familiarise the commands by looking at different tutorials.

Start by writing a script that does exactly what is required (cron is unaware of environment, so dont forget to set evering thing at the beginning of the script...), once done and tested you should be good for scheduling the job....Decide who (user) should schedule (root? a DBA? a backup operator?...) and check if that user is allowed to use cron, then check if he has a crontab file, if not create one

Could you not modify the script to email you on successful completion of the backup job?

You already have script which will check the changes of a particular network folder??? If so then it is too easy to do so