To schedule a job every 2.30 hours interval through crontab...

[Deepu Chakravarty]

Is there any possibility to schedule a job through crontab which runs every two and half hours interval? Other parameters no problem.
If yes, How?

[Peter Godron]

Deepu,
this is easier done with the at command.
man at

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

It is not possible. For this to achive you can schedule more than jobs. Scheduling two shall be enough.

at will not work as this will execute the job only once.

HTH,
Devender

[Senthil Kumar .A_1]

Hi Deepu,

You cannot acheive a cyclic run with a time interval of 2 1/2 hours with cron. That would be possible with enterprise Job scheduler like BMC's Control M product etc...

If you want to run a script/command every 2 1/2 hours.. just write a script to run the program with sleep command.say u want to run /usr/bin/ls every 2 1/2 hours.. then my ksh script will look like..

#!/usr/bin/ksh
while true
do
/usr/bin/ls
sleep 9000
done

When u run this script, it will run "ls" command indefinitely with a interval gap of 2 1/2 hours.

Regards,
Senthil Kumar .A

[Deepu Chakravarty]

Hi Senthil,
But I want run it through a schedule job. So that manual intervention is not required.

[Pete Randall]

Make a script and enter it into at

at now +150 minutes /full_path/myscript

Make the last line in your script read like this:

echo "/full_path/myscript" | at now + 150 minutes


Pete

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

As indicated earlier schedule two jobs for doing the same function at an interval of every 5 hours for both of them and at a difference of 2 & half hours among both of them.

crontab entry for such job should look like

For first job
00 1,6,11,16,21 * * *

For Second job
30 3,8,13,18,23 * * * /command


This will achive your task but with one interval being of 1&half hours instead of 2& half. This can be avoided by making a few more jobs and reducing the frequency in these two.

Other option as mentioned earlier can be used by running the code in the background and using sleep function.

HTH,
Devender

[Deepu Chakravarty]

Pete,
whether 'at'(your suggestion) will run every 2.3 hours interval automatically? Or I have to submit the job manually at every specified interval ?

[Peter Godron]

Deepu,
the at command will run 2.5 hours from the end of the previous job. No manual intervention is required, unless the job is killed. To start the job automatically at runtime, include in the /etc/rc3.d level.

[Chris Watson]

The best way to do this is to schedule the job to run on the thirtieth minute past the hour and every zeroth minute using cron.

Then in the script create a check that the invocation is one that you wish to progress with. You can implement this using control files or other means.

[Pete Randall]

The last line of your script (myscript) will resubmit the job to at, to run in 150 minutes, or two and a half hours:

echo "/full_path/myscript" | at now + 150 minutes


Pete