running a cron job on a time interval

Question

Is it possible to run a job for 2 hours at a specific time? So lets say I want to run wget command that calls/hits an endpoint in my web app for 2 consecutive hours in a day. Meaning that every single minute I want to hit this end point for the allocated 2 hour time slot. How do I do this?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 03 '13 at 08:28

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* 1-3 * * *  /path/to/command

means run your command at every minute from 1:00am to 3:59am

to run the command every minute between the hours of 1am and 3am you need run

* 1-2 * * *  /path/to/command

answered Oct 03 '13 at 08:28

ray

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Good point, +1, updated my answer – xofer Oct 03 '13 at 15:12

xofer · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-03T15:13:13.457

1

Let's say you want to run the command every minute between the hours of 1am and 3am:

* 1-2 * * *  /path/to/command

Add that to your crontab with crontab -e

EDIT: originally had this as 1-3, which as @ruifeng pointed out, means run your command at every minute from 1:00am to 3:59am.

edited Oct 03 '13 at 15:13

answered Oct 03 '13 at 01:31

xofer

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what if it is 1pm-3pm ? @xofer – user79356 Oct 03 '13 at 02:12
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@user79356 is `man cron` broken on your system? – MDMarra Oct 03 '13 at 02:31

running a cron job on a time interval

2 Answers2