How do I create a cron job that will run everyday at 12:20am?

Question

I am trying to write a cron job on my Mac OS X machine that will run a Ruby script at 12:20am everyday.

This is what I need to run but I don't know the syntax or the command to use on the Mac:

/usr/bin/ruby /Users/tamer/scripts/sftp.rb

I read about doing crontab -e but do I need to do something afterwards?

Answer 1

The crontab for "everyday at 12:20am" is

20 0 * * *

The whole line in crontab would then be

20 0 * * * /usr/bin/ruby /Users/tamer/scripts/sftp.rb

Answer 2

The crontab entry should look like:

20 0 * * * /usr/bin/ruby /Users/tamer/scripts/sftp.rb

This assumes that you don't need any other environment variables to make it all work. If you do need other variables, then create an environment-setting shell script which then executes the Ruby program and script.

To submit the job, I usually use:

crontab -l > x3
echo  "20 0 * * * /usr/bin/ruby /Users/tamer/scripts/sftp.rb" >> x3
crontab < x3
rm x3