Linux Tips, Tricks, and Opinions
great! much better than reading stupid man pages.
This may be much simpler “than reading stupid man pages” but it’s WRONG!!!!!
It will run the cron job at five minutes after every hour.
You want something like:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * echo ‘Hello’
Actually, according to “the stupid man pages”, */5 will cause it to run every 5 minutes. 
from cron(5)
Step values can be used in conjunction with ranges. Following a range
with “” specifies skips of the number’s value through the
range. For example, “0-23/2″ can be used in the hours field to specify
command execution every other hour (the alternative in the V7 standard
is “0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22″). Steps are also permitted after
an asterisk, so if you want to say “every two hours”, just use “*/2″.
.—————- minute (0 – 59)
| .————- hour (0 – 23)
| | .———- day of month (1 – 31)
| | | .——- month (1 – 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr …
| | | | .—- day of week (0 – 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
| | | | |
* * * * * command to be executed
This will give still more detailed info for cron.
Thank you for the quick and easy post. I haven’t used cron in forever and I’m not too interested in learning it all again either. I needed to run something for a client every 5 minutes and needless to say this post was quite helpful!