Whenever you’re working with linux you’ll find yourself in need of running tasks repeatedly. The easiest way to do this is to set up a recurring job using Cron.
A crontab file contains instructions for the cron(8) daemon in the following simplified manner: “run this command at this time on this
date”. – Cron Man Page
You can edit your cron jobs using crontab, specifically:
# crontab -e
If you have any other cron jobs you’ll see other entries. If not, you’ll be able to create your own entries using your favorite editor (e.g., VIM, Nano, VI, etc…).
The format for a cron entry is as follows:
minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command
There is a great tutorial available here: https://crontab.guru/every-1-hour
If I want to run a job every hour, this is the entry I’d add to Cron:
0 * * * * cd /root/scripts && ./checkrunningprocess.sh
If you ever want to see what jobs you have running you can run:
crontab -l
and you’d see something like this:
# crontab -l 0 * * * * cd /root/scripts && ./checkrunningprocess.sh
Happy automating!
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