Cron Job every two weeks

[HTF]

Hi,

I created cron job to run every two weeks on Monday however it's not working for some reason (the command itself works fine - it's just not executed by cron). Could you please check if the syntax is correct:

05 01 * * 1/2 root /bash_script.sh

Regards

[Lazydog]

How about this;

5 1 * * 1/2 root /bash_script.sh

You don't need the leading '0'. It should work.
How/where did you place this command?

[HTF]

Hi

I can try without this leading 0 however I have another command which is running fine:

00 01 * * * root /bash_script.sh

I just created crontab in /etc/cron.d/ directory

[lomcevak]

Leading zeroes is irrelevant so specifying ‘05’ or ‘5’ is the same. The crontab entry:

05 01 * * 1/2 root /bash_script.sh

The 5th field specifies day-of-week so ‘1/2’ says to run the script on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday (1,3,5,7).

Cron doesn’t have a way to specify every other week. Best you can do is have your script run every week and put code in your script to determine whether the week of the year is odd or even. So to run the script on an even week of the year:

#!/bin/sh

WK=`date +%W`
ON_WK=`expr $WK % 2`

if [ $ON_WK = 1 ];
   then echo "NOT even week"
        exit 1
   fi

To have your script run every Monday:

05 01 * * 1 root /bash_script.sh

[HTF]

Thanks for help.
- could you confirm what fields (like m, h, d) accept '/' switch

[lomcevak]

Refer to the crontab file man page:

# man 5 crontab