Cron jobs in Ubuntu?

MikeHunt79 · 12 Apr 2008 at 17:19

How on earth do I do this? When I try it in terminal, I get this error:

cron: can't lock /var/run/crond.pid, otherpid may be 4562: Resource temporarily unavailable

I've also made sure anacron and the other scheduler thing is running in the services window.

What I need to do is run some shellscript once a day...

AndrewP · 12 Apr 2008 at 17:33

How are you trying to add a cron job? It sounds like you're typing cron at the command line which will run the scheduling daemon, however you've already got it running - hence the error message.

You want to do sudo crontab -e (edit the root/system wide cron schedule) and then add your script path and timing as normal e.g.

Code:

30 9 * * * /path/to/script.sh

will run your script at 0930 everyday. I'd check the script has executable permissions and absolute pathnames in it as running via cron can do some strange things

.

deadite66 · 12 Apr 2008 at 18:10

i really like vcron for setting up cron jobs, easy to use.
http://www.linux-kheops.com/pub/vcron/vcronGB.html

MikeHunt79 · 12 Apr 2008 at 18:24

Doh, I was just running "cron"

It's been a while so I'm a little rusty, but I'll make sure my script is chmodded, and hopefully it should work. Thanks!