0 
* */1 * * * sh foo.sh

I found this setting on one production machine. And foo.sh was executed every one minute.

I am guessing that the original author of this setting wants it to be executed every one hour.

And I cannot find the official meaning of this setting in the crontab man page. Hence please help.

UPDATE:

I extracted these logs from that machine, however I cannot find the law out of them.

2013-06-29 20:47:01
2013-06-29 20:50:02
2013-06-29 20:51:01  
2013-06-29 20:53:01
2013-06-29 20:54:01  
2013-06-29 20:57:01  
2013-06-29 20:58:01  
2013-06-29 21:00:01
2013-06-29 21:05:02  
2013-06-29 21:10:02
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  • i think * in minute field means every minute,so changing that to 0 will fix this.So that foo.sh will be executed every hour.
    – Kevin Parker
    Jun 29, 2013 at 13:14

1 Answer 1

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2

Setting a start at the front will make the command run every single minute. the second */1 will be ignored. Normally you can set a value here to say: "Run this script every minute between 22:00 and 23:00.

The first star needs to be a 0: 

0 */1 * * * sh foo.sh

If you set the * value it will match every minute. If you set the 0, it will execute every hour when the minutes of the current time equals to 0, so 01:00,02:00,03:00,...

If you set it to 15 like this:

15 */1 * * * sh foo.sh

It will execute every hour, 15 minutes past the hour. So at 01:15, 02:15,03:15,...

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4
  • Yes, I always do that. But since this setting has already been in production, I want to know the actual behavior in this case. The interval was not exactly every one minute.
    – aXqd
    Jun 29, 2013 at 13:16
  • Normally it should run every minute.
    – Lucas Kauffman
    Jun 29, 2013 at 13:20
  • Thanks lucas, please see my updates. The result is really confusing to me.
    – aXqd
    Jun 29, 2013 at 13:23
  • */1 is not ignored, it's just that it's the same as *. If it were * */2 * * *, it would execute at every minute of every other hour.
    – sch
    Jun 29, 2013 at 20:30

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