Anilrgowda

I have an input form for employees to enter in hours for payroll online. I need to set up a cron job to query the database for the information every two weeks. I am new at using a cron job and don't know exactly how to set it up or save, write, or implement the cron job.

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Anilrgowda

I've never heard of any unix cron that doesn't accept the standard cron format which I posted above. Here are some more examples:

01 * * * * hourlycmd runs every hour at :01
02 4 * * * dailycmd runs at 4:02 am everyday
22 4 * * 0 weeklycmd runs each week on sunday (0 day) at 4:22 am
42 4 1 * * monthlycmd runs the first day of each month at 4:42am

As far as I know you can't make cron do something every other two weeks. But in the script you call with cron you can add a test to see if you ran last week or not, so effectively it will only run every two weeks.

Use this:
if test -f /somedir/ranlastweek
then
rm /somedir/ranlastweek
exit
fi
touch /somedir/ranlastweek #touch creates the file or if it already exists updates its timestamps
The commands you want to run every two weeks here

(props to omarfarid for this simple script)

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