[Sheflug] Cron Job

[Richard <nospam [at] sheflug.co.uk>]

Dear All

Now that I've got sendmail, fetchmail and procmail almost sorted out
I'd like to set up a cron job so that I can get my gateway box to
connect to the net and download mail whilst I'm away.

Problem is that cron syntax aren't something that I understand too
well.  I'd like to download mail from 6 a.m to 12 p.m. but not during
the small hours of the morning.  I'd also like to connect every hour
or two hours during the day.  The command to connect for ISDN is
`isdnctrl dial ippp0'.  It should disconnect itself when the
connection times out.  There's a utility program in isdnctrl that does
that for you.

Can someone describe an exact command to put into cron ?  Looking at
my SuSE 7.0 book it says......

"Cron tables are located in /var/cron/tabs.  /etc/crontab serves as s
system wide cron table.  You need to enter the name of the user who
should run the command directly after the timetable.  Package specific
tables, located in /etc/cron.d have the same format.  /etc/crontab
cannot be processed with crontab -e but must be loaded directly into
an editor, modified, and then saved.

A number of packages install shell scripts to the directory
/etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily and so on whose instructions are
controlled by /usr/lib/cron/run-crons.  /usr/lib/cron/run-crons is run
every 15 minutes from the main table /etc/crontab."

So, looks as though I put something into /etc/crontab ?  Just the
syntax that's something I don't understand.

Thanks

-- 
Richard


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.