Question about crontab

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to run a cron every Tuesday at midnight for the next five months. Last night though my cron ran...and I got into trouble at work. Can someone help me correct this crontab?

0 0 * 1-5 3 perl weeklycron.pl >>mylog.log

Comment on Question about crontab

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Re: Question about crontab by philcrow (Priest) on Jan 23, 2008 at 19:53 UTC
I think your day of week is off by one. Tuesday is 2, since Sunday is 0. You can use names, which are a bit more readable. At least, that's what my man page says on Ubuntu. Phil The Gantry Web Framework Book is now available.	[reply]
Re^2: Question about crontab by pc88mxer (Vicar) on Jan 23, 2008 at 23:30 UTC
That might be a "midnight" ambiguity. Actually, I avoid running cron jobs directly on the hour (or small fractions thereof). Too many other people schedule their jobs that way, and it leads to load average spikes at those times. Maybe it's time to update cron with load balancing heuristics.	[reply]
Re: Question about crontab by pc88mxer (Vicar) on Jan 23, 2008 at 19:39 UTC
I'm sure need to fully qualify your path names: `0 0 * 1-5 3 /usr/bin/perl /where/is/your/script/weeklycron.pl >>/same/ +problem/here/mylog.log` [download] What other trouble did you get informed about?	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Question about crontab by igelkott (Priest) on Jan 23, 2008 at 20:41 UTC
After fixing the immediate problems cited above, you may also check if that logfile needs to be rotated.	[reply]