Neat scheduling tricks

What if you'd want to run something every 10 minutes? Well you could do this: 
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh
But crontab allows you to do this as well: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh
Which will do exactly the same. Can you do the the math? ;)

Special words

If you use the first (minute) field, you can also put in a keyword instead of a number: 
@reboot     Run once, at startup
@yearly     Run once  a year     "0 0 1 1 *"
@annually   (same as  @yearly)
@monthly    Run once  a month    "0 0 1 * *"
@weekly     Run once  a week     "0 0 * * 0"
@daily      Run once  a day      "0 0 * * *"
@midnight   (same as  @daily)
@hourly     Run once  an hour    "0 * * * *
Leave the rest of the fields empty so this would be valid: 
@daily /bin/execute/this/script.sh

Storing the crontab output

By default cron saves the output of /bin/execute/this/script.sh in the user's mailbox (root in this case). But it's prettier if the output is saved in a separate logfile. Here's how: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh 2>&1 >> /var/log/script_output.log

Explained

Linux can report on different levels. There's standard output (STDOUT) and standard errors (STDERR). STDOUT is marked 1, STDERR is marked 2. So the following statement tells Linux to store STDERR in STDOUT as well, creating one datastream for messages & errors: 
2>&1
Now that we have 1 output stream, we can pour it into a file. Where > will overwrite the file,  >> will append to the file. In this case we'd like to to append: 
>> /var/log/script_output.log

Mailing the crontab output

By default cron saves the output in the user's mailbox (root in this case) on the local system. But you can also configure crontab to forward all output to a real email address by starting your crontab with the following line: 
MAILTO="yourname@yourdomain.com"

Mailing the crontab output of just one cronjob

If you'd rather receive only one cronjob's output in your mail, make sure this package is installed: 
aptitude install mailx
And change the cronjob like this: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh 2>&1 | mail -s "Cronjob ouput" yourname@yourdomain.com

Trashing the crontab output

Now that's easy: 
*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh 2>&1 > /dev/null
Just pipe all the output to the null device, also known as the black hole. On Unix-like operating systems, /dev/null is a special file that discards all data written to it.