If you want to remove the contents of your crontab, you can use this command:<\/p>\n
\r\ncrontab -r\r\n<\/pre>\nCreating your crontab file<\/h4>\n
The easiest way for beginners to create a cron job and add it to crontab is to use the examples above, along with your script, and create a simple text file with all of your jobs – each on a separate line. You save this file using whatever name you like and then you'll need to upload it to your server using an FTP client such as FileZilla.<\/p>\n
To use this text file as your crontab, you can use the following command (you may need to “cd” or change directory to find where you uploaded your text file):<\/p>\n
\r\ncrontab my-cron-jobs.txt\r\n<\/pre>\nDoing this will overwrite all existing cron jobs without warning, so make sure you've either backed them up or included them in your text file if you need them.<\/p>\n
Email notifications for your cron jobs<\/h4>\n
By default, cron will send any output from the script to your email address if you've specified one. If you have multiple cron jobs running and you don't change the default output, you'll receive everything the script outputs – which can be overwhelming for your email inbox.<\/p>\n
To add email notifications to your crontab schedule, you'll need to modify it by adding MAILTO=\"\"<\/code> to a new line. For example:<\/p>\n\r\nMAILTO="yourname@yoursite.com"\r\n0 * * * * your\/cron\/job.php\r\n<\/pre>\nThis will send email notifications each time this script is run, complete with outputs. For this job, that means an email every hour for each time the script is run.<\/p>\n
Receiving error notifications<\/h4>\n
If you don't want to receive the entire output of your tasks, but you do want to be notified of errors in the script then you can redirect normal output messages into a “black hole” by using the command > \/dev\/null<\/code>. Anything sent here is ignored by the system, but error messages will send as normal. For example:<\/p>\n\r\nMAILTO="yourname@yoursite.com"\r\n0 * * * * your\/cron\/job.php > \/dev\/null\r\n<\/pre>\nCommon cron job errors<\/h4>\n
You you received any error messages when running the command crontab my-cron-jobs.txt<\/code> then you may have made one of the following errors:<\/p>\n\n- You split your time schedule and script command onto more than one line. All cron job tasks should be a single line. Make sure you turn off the Word Wrap function of any text editor you use and avoid Microsoft Word or other word processors that add formatting.<\/li>\n
- Your crontab file didn't end with a new line. At the end of your last crontab command line, you need to press enter or return to end your file with a new line.<\/li>\n
- Your text file was not in ASCII format. If you used Word, or added formatting this may have caused the error. Resave your file as .txt using a simple editor like Notepad then reupload the .txt using your FTP client.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Cron jobs can seem overwhelming at first, but once you've run a few of them with various scripts you'll see that they are a valuable tool for system admins and performing many functions on web sites and web applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A beginners guide to cron jobs, what they are, how to use them and example cron jobs to perform scheduled tasks for your web site or web application.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitebeginner.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}