Adding a cronjob

How do I add a cronjob to Solaris?

[Jordan]

The same way as in Linux

crontab -e

You will be entered into a file with your default editor.

[MHJ]

I am not familiar with what this refers to. What exactly is a crontab?

[Jame]

Cron is a scheduler like Windows Scheduler. It will execute events at the given times you input.

[LissaValerian]

Here is another way to edit the crontab file (not that theres anything wrong with the previous way!)

I like to write my crontabs out to a file, make a backup, edit the file, then write it back to the cron. I'm always careful of using crontab -e because if you do ^d in the middle of it, you wipe out the entire crontab. Yikes! And I've done that before.

So this is what I do:

crontab -l > crontab.username
# make a backup of the crontab
cp crontab.username crontab.username.MMDDYY##

vi crontab.username
# make my crontab edits

crontab crontab.username.out

# reads it back into the crontab.

Call that an abundance of caution. :-) Believe me, I've hosed my crontab on more than one occasion. And when you have crontabs that are like 3 pages long, that is NO fun.

backups are good. :-)