The crontab command, found in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, is used to schedule commands to be executed periodically. It reads a series of commands from standard input and collects them into a file known also known as a "crontab" which is later read and whose instructions are carried out.

Generally, crontab uses a daemon, crond, which runs constantly in the background and checks once a minute to see if any of the scheduled jobs need to be executed. If so, it executes them. These jobs are generally referred to as cron jobs.

Crontab files

The crontab files are where the lists of jobs and other instructions to the cron daemon are kept. Users can have their own individual crontab files and often there is a systemwide crontab file (usually in /etc or a subdirectory of /etc) which is also used but can only be edited by the system administrator(s).

Crontab files have a particular format. Each line of a crontab file follows a particular format as a series of fields, separated by spaces and/or tabs. Each field can have a single value or a series of values.

Operators

There are several ways of specifying multiple values in a field:

• The comma (',') operator specifies a list of values, for example: "1,3,4,7,8"
• The dash ('-') operator specifies a range of values, for example: "1-6", which is equivalent to "1,2,3,4,5,6"
• The asterisk ('*') operator specifies all possible values for a field. For example, an asterisk in the hour time field would be equivalent to 'every hour'.

There is also an operator which some extended versions of cron support, the slash ('/') operator, which can be used to skip a given number of values. For example, "*/3" in the hour time field is equivalent to "0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21"; "*" specifies 'every hour' but the "/3" means that only the first, fourth, seventh...and such values given by "*" are used.

Fields

The first five fields of the line are the date and time field which specify how frequently and when to execute a command.

Note: For day of the week, both 0 and 7 are considered Sunday.

The sixth and subsequent fields (i.e., the rest of the line) specify the command to be run.

See also

• at (runs a job at a specified future time)