UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

can someone please check my answers for the crontabs I am making

1. how would I set up a crontab tab executes every 2 minutes each and every day of the week?
answer: 2 * * * * /path/to/file.pl <-- is this correct?


2. how would I set up a crontab that executes every 24 hours at 2am?
answer: 0 2 * * * /path/to/file.pl <-- is this correct?



3. how would I set up a crontab that executes every week on Sunday at 3am?
answer: 0 3 * * 0 /path/to/file.pl <-- this is correct, no?

Bob,
Is this a homework?

no it is for a web game (a free one) that I am making for fun

the first one updates every two minutes -- it calculates the number of resources your country makes per hour and updates every 2 minutes (cash, oil, etc)

the second one compiles each countries stats every 24 hours and enters them into a db to be used to plot graphs/statistics, etc

the 3rd is done weekly which will do the actual graphing of stastics for all players after compiling the last 7 days of statistics to calculate the Hall of Famers for the week

it's a geopolitical game -- based on current events.. it has been fun to make.. I just need to get the crontabs working

can you confirm my crontabs are correct please?

Ok, assuming this is not a homework, here is the format of "crontab":

Code:

minute  hour  day_of_month  month  day_of_week  <command>

Specifying "*" means every occurence.
You can separate multiple values by comma, example:
if you enter: 1,3,5 in the "hour" parameter, it means you want your
job to run at 1:00, 3:00 and 5:00 o'clock.
You can also enter ranges using "-" (dash) in between numbers:
7-12 means all acceptable values between 7 and 12, including both.

Hello SHell_Life

seeing that I am 34 years old -- I haven't had "homework" in over a decade!

I have a crontab currently as:

10 * * * * path/to/file

this executes every 10th minute on the hour -- I wanted it to execute every 10 minutes.

I have read a few tutorials and understand the basics of crontab but I am unable to find examples that execute every 2 minutes.

2 * * * * would execute every 2nd minute after each hour, wouldn't it?

Bob,
To run every 10 minutes, code it this way:

Code:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * <your_command>

I think I found it.. every 2 minutes is:

*/2 * * * * path/to/file.pl