can someone explain crontab to me better?

[Benjamin Sobotta]

Hi!

Those entries have nothing to do with duration.
The entry of you would run every two hours or better every even hour and then 
every 5 minutes like:

8:00
8:05
8:10
.
8:55
10:00
10:05
10:10
.
.
.

so if you want something to run every two hours it should look like

10 */2 * * * root /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

This would make it run like

8:10
10:10
12:10
.
.

I hope this helps - and works :) Haven't tried it.

Cheers,

Ben

On Sunday 19 September 2004 17:42, robg wrote:
> hi,
>
> i am having a hard time understanding crontab after reading
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/configtuning-cron
>.html .. i still can't understand the minutes/hours...
>
> when you specify minutes, does it mean the command is run every X
> minutes? and if you specify a hour AND minutes, the command is run
> every X hours for X minutes?  so if i did
>
> */5 */2 * * * root /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
>
> it would run that command every two hours for 5 minutes?  so when two
> hours comes around, itll keep running that command over and over for 5
> minutes? or will it run that command once every 5 minutes for two
> hours? im confused
>
> i just want to know the syntax to run something every 2 hours once ..
> can someone clarify this
>
> thanks