Today we will learn “How to Schedule a Cron Job every 5, 10 and 15 Minutes”. The Cron’s job is to schedule the Backup, for logrotate, To run any scripts on the server at a given interval time.
Cron jobs in Linux help us to automate the tasks without fail. At the given timestamp it will run like a scheduler and do your mentioned job.
So there is a crond daemon which enables cron to run in the background. You can schedule the scripts at any time interval or as needed. It can be on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis or a combination of these.
In this tutorial, we will cover 3 topics to Run Cron job every 5, 10, or 15 Minutes. But before that let’s understand the fields in Cron Jobs. If you know the fields you can jump into the Run a Cron job section.
Explain cron jobs scheduling fields in Linux
So on the above screenshot, we can see the fields like “* * * * *”. What this *(star) represents.
| Field | Values | Examples | Description |
| minute | 0 – 59 | */5 * * * * | Run job every 5th minute. |
| hour | 0 – 23 | 0 16 * * * | Run job at 4:00 PM. |
| day of month | 1 – 31 | 0 16 25 * * * | Run job at 25th day at 4:00 PM. |
| month | 1 – 12 | 0 0 * 5 * | Run job at 25th May at 12:00 AM. |
| day of week | 0 – 6/1-7 | 0 3 * * 1 | Run job at 3 AM at Monday. |
So there are 5 important fields that help us to schedule the cron job in Linux. let’s discuss this in detail.
- minute: This field will execute the jobs at a particular minute. e.g: Run the jobs every 5 min.
- hour: This field will execute the jobs on an hourly basis. e.g: Run the job every 6 hours.
- day of month: Suppose you have to execute your job on a particular day of the month. e.g: Have to run the script on the 10th day of every month.
- month: This field will execute the jobs on a monthly basis. e.g: You have to execute the job only in January.
- day of week: This field will execute the job on a weekly basis. e.g: You have to run the script only from Monday to Friday.
Schedule a Cron Job every 5 minutes.
So the script or the command will run cron job every 5 minutes, like in the below-shown box.
05, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 00
So in an hour the script or command will run the jobs 12 times.
*/5 * * * * /home/tastethelinux/check_the_files.sh
We have scheduled a script check_the_file.sh that runs at every 5 minutes interval.
Schedule a Cron Job every 10 minutes.
So the script or the command will run every 10 minutes, like in the below-shown box.
10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 00
So in an hour the script or command will run the jobs 6 times.
*/10 * * * * /home/tastethelinux/check_the_files.sh
We have scheduled a script check_the_file.sh that runs at every 10 minutes interval.
Run a Cron Job every 15 minute.
So the script or the command will run every 15 minutes, like in the below-shown box.
15, 30, 45, 00
So in an hour the script or command will run the jobs 4 times.
*/15 * * * * /home/tastethelinux/check_the_files.sh
We have scheduled a script check_the_file.sh that runs at every 15 minutes interval.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we have seen “What are the fields for the Cron Jobs”. And then “How to Run the Cron Job every 5, 10 or 15 Minutes”. Any issues or feedback please let us know in the comment section. There is the best site where you can find the correct cron scheduler for your script or command.
