How to create cron statement to run for multiple hours

Question

I need a cron statement to run for few hours eg 1-8 then 10-15. In this case will the following statement work,

0 1-8,10-15 * * * 

If not can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance, Gnik

Solution 1

You cannot, you can use either multiple values OR a range

0 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,11,12,13,14,15 * * *

Source:

Time tags are separated by spaces. Do not use spaces within a tag, this will confuse cron. All five tags must be present. They are a logical AND of each other. There is another space between the last time tag and the first command.

A time tag can be a wildcard "*", which means "all". It can be one value, several values, a range, or a fractional range.

Solution 2

I find it more readable to have two crontab entries:

0 1-8 * * * ...
0 10-15 * * * ...

Comments

[K Raphael]

+1. much cleaner/concise. downside is that if something in the command changes, you now have multiple places to edit it

[eddy85br]

you could use a bash script to encapsulate the parameters, Then, on crontab just call a single bash script for both entries.