General Information

Cron is the *nix program that runs scheduled tasks that are read from /etc/crontab.  This guide will teach you how to make a scheduled process by using cron.

Requirements

1. Possible root access

Configuration

Adding a task for cron to do is rather simple.  Just edit the crontab with our task.

#	crontab -u root -e

The -u flag tells crontab to tweak the following user's crontab and the -e flag tells crontab to edit the file.

For this example, we will follow the format and update our ports tree every morning at 3am.

#minute hour    mday    month   wday    command with full path 0       3       *       *       *       /usr/sbin/cvsup -g -L2 /etc/cvsupfile

Save and exit.  Now your ports tree will be updated every morning.

Author: Jon LaBass
jon at bsdguides dot org