Cron useage question

[Robert Locke]

On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 18:48, Gene Heskett wrote:
> Greetings;
> 
> I have need to add a "monthly event" to my root crontab. I know that 
> the first two place holders (the '*'s) in the timeline are hours and 
> minutes, but the manpages contain no hints as to what the next three 
> '*'s represent.  I would think that after 11 years, that lack of info 
> and the resultant questions would have managed to get the manpages 
> rewritten to include that info.
> 
> Anyway, can anyone enlighten me on this please?

Gene,

They are in my man pages.... but let me conjecture....

Are you simply typing in "man crontab"?  That will show you the man page
for the "crontab" command from chapter (1).  Try typing in "man 5
crontab" to have it show you the information from chapter (5) which is
"data and config files".  An excerpt from mine:

>        The time and date fields are:
>  
>               field          allowed values
>               -----          --------------
>               minute         0-59
>               hour           0-23
>               day of month   1-31
>               month          1-12 (or names, see below)
>               day of week    0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
>                                                                                 
>        A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for ‘‘first-last’’.
>                                                                                 
>        Ranges of numbers are allowed.  Ranges are two numbers separated with a
>        hyphen.   The  specified  range is inclusive.  For example, 8-11 for an
>        ‘‘hours’’ entry specifies execution at hours 8, 9, 10 and 11.
>                                                                                 
>        Lists are allowed.  A list is a set of numbers (or ranges) separated by
>        commas.  Examples: ‘‘1,2,5,9’’, ‘‘0-4,8-12’’.
>                                                                                 

HTH a little,

--Rob