[thelist] Task scheduling in linux CRON

Hassan Schroeder hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 09:31:10 CDT 2009


On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Kipper Timmins
<kipper_timmins at live.co.uk> wrote:

> # m h  dom mon dow u command
> 05 14 * * * kipper vlc
>
> am i right in thinking that at the specified time this should open vlc media player? the command for opening this at command line on my comp is vlc
> and this should be at 2:05 on every day of every week in every month right?

Have you read the man page for crontab??

Right now, at 5 minutes after 2 in the afternoon, your computer will
try to run some program named 'kipper', with an argument of 'vlc'.
I'm surprised you're not getting an email about that error.

In any case, cron jobs don't inherit your full normal environment, so
as a matter of course you're best off putting in the full path to any
command, e.g. /usr/local/bin/vlc (or whatever).

I'd guess there will be some arguments you need to pass to vlc to
make it do something specific, too.

Seriously, though `man crontab -s 5` would help...

HTH,
-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder at gmail.com



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