Question

this is my first time writing script for cron job.

I wrote my code in shell, (which it works) and I’m trying to set it up for cron.
So here is my question. How do I set up the cron? Am I suppose to write
10 * * * * /home/workstation/deleter.sh (I want it to run every 10min)
right underneath #!/bin/sh? How would I execute it? (deleter.sh has permission via chmod)
man 1 crontab returns “No entry for crontab in section 1 of the manual”
I’m really lost and confused right now. If someone know how to set up cron please tell me!!

Thanks in advance

#!/bin/sh

counter=0
logloc=/home/ServerLogs
backup=/home/test
## Reads the location of the file systems that needs to be investigated from location.txt
## and save it into an array
while read -r line; do
   Unix_Array[${counter}]=$line;
   let counter=counter+1;
done < location.txt
## Reads Email recipients and save it into an array
More code continues from here......

Answer 1

To setup the cron, you can do one of two (main) things. The first would be to place the specified line in /etc/crontab. The second would be to run crontab -e and place the line in there. I would recommend to use crontab -e so the cron will execute as your own user account.

If the full path to the script is /home/workstation/deleter.sh and it does have execute-privileges, as you specified – your current line will have it execute 10-minutes past the hour, every hour. To get it to execute every 10 minutes, you’ll have to use */10, like this:

*/10 * * * * /home/workstation/deleter.sh