Scheduling perl scripts to run at a certain time, or at a certain interval is usually done by some service of
the operating system. In Unix/Linux/Mac OSX this can be crontab, and we call the processes cron-jobs.
On Windows there is a service called scheduler that will do the work.
Linux/Unix/Mac OSX
The crontab on Linux/Unix/Mac OSX can be configured by editing a text file with a special command.
Each line in the file is a scheduled job.
Empty lines and lines starting with # are disregarded:
The other lines contain 6 values. The first five represent the schedule in the following order: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week.
The 6th is the actual command.
- at any of the first five slots mean "every" so a * at the first slot means "every minute".
The following crontab will run every minute:
# m h dom mon dow command
* * * * * /home/gabor/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.18.2/bin/perl /home/gabor/bin/ts.pl >> /home/gabor/ts.out
How to run a Perl script automatically every 12pm
The following crontab will run every day at 12 hour 0 minutes.
# m h dom mon dow command
0 12 * * * /home/gabor/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.18.2/bin/perl /home/gabor/bin/ts.pl >> /home/gabor/ts.out
Every user in a Unix/Linux system has her own crontab. crontab -l will list the crontab file of the
current user. You can prepare a text file (e.g. crontab.txt) describing your cron-jobs with any editor and then load them
using crontab path/to/crontab.txt. I usually keep that text file under version-control.
Every hour +0, +20, and +40 minutes:
0,20,40 * * * * command
Every 2 minutes:
*/2 * * * * command
MS Windows
MS Windows has a service called Windows Task Scheduler. Use that.
Comments
How to run the written Perl program for every 1 hour in Windows? I need to take back up of files for every one hour. Please help.
Look for the Windows Task Scheduler: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/taskschd/task-scheduler-start-page
Hi Gabor, Few doubts want to get off.
- why can't we write 0 1 * * * command to run for every hour instead code line you provided.
- When I tried to replicate same code and tried to run corntab.txt by source command . I got error saying that 0 command not found so is there any header file to include before these set of lines. can you please help me in this.
- That's the same I wrote with different numbers
- Then you might have done something else not what I wrote
