I'm trying to figure out how to set cron to run every day at 6 p.m. Is this correct?
The reason I'm asking is this is for a production server, so I need to be sure.
* 18 * * *
cron. daily will run at 3:05AM i.e. run once a day at 3:05AM. cron. weekly will run at 3:25AM i.e. run once a week at 3:25AM.
0 * * * * -this means the cron will run always when the minutes are 0 (so hourly) 0 1 * * * - this means the cron will run always at 1 o'clock. * 1 * * * - this means the cron will run each minute when the hour is 1.
What does * mean in Cron? The asterisk * is used as a wildcard in Cron. * sets the execution of a task to any minute, hour, day, weekday, or month.
0 18 * * * command to be executed ^ you need to set the minute, too. Else it would be running every minute on the 18th hour
How to setup a cronjob in general:
# * * * * * command to execute # │ │ │ │ │ # │ │ │ │ │ # │ │ │ │ └───── day of week (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday, or use names; 7 is Sunday, the same as 0) # │ │ │ └────────── month (1 - 12) # │ │ └─────────────── day of month (1 - 31) # │ └──────────────────── hour (0 - 23) # └───────────────────────── min (0 - 59)
What does Asterisk (*) mean
The asterisk indicates that the cron expression matches for all values of the field. E.g., using an asterisk in the 4th field (month) indicates every month.
Sidenote
Other special characters in cronjobs
Slash ( / )
Slashes describe increments of ranges. For example 3-59/15 in the 1st field (minutes) indicate the third minute of the hour and every 15 minutes thereafter. The form "*/..." is equivalent to the form "first-last/...", that is, an increment over the largest possible range of the field.
Comma ( , )
Commas are used to separate items of a list. For example, using "MON,WED,FRI" in the 5th field (day of week) means Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Hyphen ( - )
Hyphens define ranges. For example, 2000-2010 indicates every year between 2000 and 2010 AD, inclusive.
Percent ( % )
Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (), are changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % are sent to the command as standard input.
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron)
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