Crontab help

[Damien]

hi, ive been messing around with crontab, and just have a few questions regarding it.
1) are you supposed to see the command running at the specific time or is it to run silently in the back ground (i ask this because when i think i have it set up properly, nothing seems to happen on the terminal..)
2)can any one send on a basic crontab file that they use, so i can compare it with mine.....

Thanks
Damien

[adelie]

Re: Crontab help

You could check /var/log/syslog to see if the command is being executed. Also keep in mind to use full path for everything in your shell scripts that run under cron.

There really isn't any good 'example' because crontab file can vary from machine to machine. But you use the general format of

* * * * * <full path to command>

doing 'man 5 crontab' will give you an explination of what each field means .