How can I programmatically create a new cron job?

Asked 2009-03-04T14:34:08.373

158

I want to be able to programatically add a new cron job, what is the best way to do this?

From my research, it seems I could dump the current crontab and then append a new one, piping that back into crontab:

(crontab -l ; echo "0 * * * * wget -O - -q http://www.example.com/cron.php") | crontab -

Is there a better way?

linux unix cron

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2 Answers

171

The best way if you're running as root, is to drop a file into /etc/cron.d

if you use a package manager to package your software, you can simply lay down files in that directory and they are interpreted as if they were crontabs, but with an extra field for the username, e.g.:

Filename: /etc/cron.d/per_minute

Content: * * * * * root /bin/sh /home/root/script.sh

answered 2009-03-04T14:38:40.920

also you can add your tasks to /etc/cron.*/

answered 2009-03-06T10:39:28.623

How can I programmatically create a new cron job?

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