Cron and Crontab

[MunsonBurner]

Does anyone know how to set up a simple crontab file and get it working? I'd like it to perform a function everyday (e.g) to email a file attachment to myself.

 

Step by step on the cron and crontab would be great, i really don't get it.

 

Any takers?

[rhodesa]

http://www.manpagez.com/man/5/crontab/

 

for most *nix systems, the command to edit the crontab is:

crontab -e

-each user has it's own crontab, and the above command will edit the crontab for whichever user you are logged in as

-each line is an entry (except for comments, which start with #)

-the first part of the entry is WHEN to do it, and the second part is WHAT to do

-the WHAT part can be any command (easiest thing to do is make a script, then run the script as a command)

 

the above page explains how to format the WHEN and WHAT parts.