Alright, so yesterday I decided to mess around with cron. I had this idea to run a simple script at a very specific time, 8:59 PM, just for kicks. So here’s the story of how it went.
First, I fired up my terminal. I needed to edit the crontab, you know, the place where all the scheduled tasks live.
I typed in crontab -e and hit Enter. This opened up the crontab file in the default editor, which, thankfully, was just a simple text editor.
Then, I added a new line to the file. The format, I’ll admit, can be a little cryptic if you don’t do it all the time, but I use it quite often. I wrote:
59 20 /path/to/my/*- 59 is the minute.
- 20 is the hour (8 PM in 24-hour format).
- The first means every day of the month.
- The second means every month.
- The third means every day of the week.
- And the last part,
/path/to/my/*,That’s just where I’d put the script I wanted to run.
I double-checked everything, cause one tiny mistake and it won’t work. It’s kind easy to forget, so you need to be careful.Saved the file, and closed the editor.
Then came the waiting game. I kept an eye on the clock, made some coffee, did other stuff on the computer. The anticipation!
Finally, 8:59 PM rolled around. I was watching the system logs, just to be sure, and BAM! There it was. My script ran perfectly, just as planned. It wrote a simple “Hello from cron!” message to a file. Basic, I know, but I’m still learnig cron.
Honestly, it’s a pretty cool feeling, setting something up like that and having it work exactly when you told it to. I am a little proud of myself, I got to remember this command to the schedule.
