From: Ramon Casha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Malta Linux User Group - general list <[email protected]>
To: Malta Linux User Group - general list <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [LINUX.ORG.MT] Crontab Creation
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 14:26:18 +0200
1. Create a shell script which updates your virus definitions. Test it
to make sure it works.
A Perl Script already exists which came with F-Prot, it works I updated the
definitions today.
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.
Those directories exist, plus cron.hourly, and cron.d (what does this mean
cron.d?). What is plonking and how do I plonk the script to #1?
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!
Ok I think I understood this, but when I run crontab -e in the console the
screen gets filled with lines with just ~ on the sides and some details at
the bottom of the screen, I cannot even scroll up to see what happened
before. What should I do exactly?
The first thing I do is change to the cron.weekly directory in the console
and then I do crontab -e and I get what I described above. I am really stuck
right now.
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