Confirm crontab

Question

Just want someone to confirm this is the correct cron configuration to have the server restart Apache every Sunday night. I have never done a cron command which had a space in it, so want to make sure it's correct.

0 3 * * 0 /bin/sh /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

Answer 1

To begin with, why are you restarting Apache on a cron - furthermore why with a SIGKILL (restart) statement rather than SIGHUP (graceful)

This is a much "friendlier" means of restarting Apache, so that you don't kill off existing sessions.

/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful

Your cron will kill and start Apache at 3am on Sunday.

Bear in mind, different OS'es have different possible notation for Sunday on a crontab - it could be any of:

0 3 * * sun
0 3 * * 0
0 3 * * 7

And if you don't want to be harassed via email, you can discard STERR and STOUT by appending this to the end of your command

> /dev/null 2>&1

Answer 2

Looks fine to me, I guess. You might want to redirect output somewhere, even if it's just /dev/null. Otherwise cron will start trying to email you.