Cron Wizard

This form helps you set up cron, that runs scripts at periodic intervals on the webserver of your Foswiki site. Cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a given schedule.

Cron is a program that runs on Unix, Linux and Mac OS X, not on Windows. If your website runs on a Windows server, you cannot use this wizard (unless you are using cygwin).

Crontab entry help form

With this form you can easily edit cron commands in your crontab file

Path to your Foswiki bin directory

For example: /usr/local/foswiki/bin
A bin directory must be specified

Perl parameter

For example: -wT (which switches on perl warnings and taint checks)

Script

For example: mailnotify (which is used to send out change notifications)
A script name must be specified

Script parameters

For example: Sandbox WebHome

Run script at interval

every 5 minutes every 10 minutes every 15 minutes every 30 minutes every hour every 2 hours every 4 hours every 6 hours every day once a week

Log file

For example: /usr/local/foswiki/logs/mailnotify.log (capture script output to this file, will be overwritten each time the script runs)

Output

Write the output of this form in your system's crontab.

Set the crontab editor to nano (if you don't like vi), and set it to editing mode:

export EDITOR=nano
crontab -e

Copy-paste this line and save the file:

Cron runs reguarly and checks if the crontab has been updated.

More info

• How to Create a Cron Job (Scheduled Task) for Your Website or Blog
• Wikipedia:Cron