1. Create a shell script which updates your virus definitions. Test it to make sure it works.
2. Check if you have a directory called /etc/cron.weekly. If you do, then the easiest way to add a weekly job is to plonk the shell script from #1 in that directory. There's also cron.monthly, cron.daily etc. depending how frequent you want it. that's all... unless you want more precise control: 3. If you want more precise control, for instance specifying exactly which day of the month or week you want it to run in, create a cron entry. To do this, login as whichever user has permissions to update the virus database (probably root), then type "crontab -e". If this is the first time you're running it, it will create the crontab file. In this file, add a single line: 0 8 * * * /usr/bin/update-viruses In the above line, I'm assuming that the shell-script to update the viruses is called /usr/bin/update-viruses. Change it to your virus-updating script. The first part consists of the minutes, hours, day-of-month, month and day-of-week. So, in the above line I'm telling it to execute the script at 8 am (minutes=0, hours=8) of any day, month or weekday. To make it run only on the first of each month at midnight, do the following: 0 0 1 * * /usr/bin/update-viruses ...and to run at 8.30pm every saturday, do this: 30 20 * * 6 /usr/bin/update-viruses Whatever you do, make sure you specify the first field (minutes) to some value, or it will run every minute! ________________________________________________________________________ Ramon Casha Malta Linux User Group (http://linux.org.mt)
