## Day 11 Task: Explain in detail crontab

crontab

Crontab is like a personal assistant for your computer. It helps you schedule tasks or reminders to happen at specific times automatically. Just like you set alarms on your phone to wake you up in the morning or remind you of appointments, crontab lets you schedule your computer to do things without you having to remember.

You can tell the crontab to run a specific task every day, every week, or even every minute. It uses simple language with numbers and symbols to represent the time intervals. For example, you can set it up to run a task every day at 3 PM or every week on Sundays at 8 AM.

Use the command crontab -e then will open the crontab editor.

Please find below a basic ASCII representation of a crontab schedule:

luaCopy code  +--------------- Minute (0 - 59)
  | +------------- Hour (0 - 23)
  | | +----------- Day of the month (1 - 31)
  | | | +--------- Month (1 - 12)
  | | | | +------- Day of the week (0 - 7, 0 and 7 represent Sunday)
  | | | | |
  * * * * *

Each asterisk (*) represents a wildcard, meaning "every." So, a crontab line with all asterisks means "run the command every minute of every hour, every day of the month, every month, and every day of the week."

• 0 2 * * * means "run the command at 2:00 AM every day."

• */15 * * * * means "run the command every 15 minutes."

• 0 12 * * 1-5 means "run the command at 12:00 PM from Monday to Friday."

• 30 4 1,15 * * means "run the command at 4:30 AM on the 1st and 15th day of every month."