UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I need to create a cron job that will run daily to change permissions to a particular folder to 666 every 24hrs.

I have no experience with crontab or cron jobs at all so if someone can guide me through this it would be a great help.

The folder's example is 'www/test/htdocs'

Also if you can show me how to run the same permission every 12 hrs that would be great as well.

Thanks sooo much in advance

cron will use a crontab. You will need to run the crontab -e command to edit the crontab. The cron file has a format of 5 date fields followed by the command you want to execute.
The date fields are laid out as
Field Allowed values

minute 0-59

hour 0-23

day of month 1-31

month 1-12 (or names, see below)

day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)

A field can be an asterisk (*), which always stands for first-last.

So to run you command every 24 hrs at 11:00pm you would edit the crontab and enter

00 11 * * * chmod 666 /www/test/htdocs

Sorry the 11 shoudl have been a 23 to run at 11:00pm before. If you need to run every 12 ours once at 11:00am and 11:00pm then enter

00 11,23 * * * chmod 666 /www/test/htdocs

Thank you soo much it was very easy to follow. As soon as I am done I will update the post.