CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cron
Andreas B
Andreas B

Reputation: 407

Cron periodically for different scripts

I would like to run several scripts every half-hour. This obviously would work with this line

*/30 * * * * script.sh

My question now is how I would be able to run several of these at different times. As in, script.sh to run 5 minutes before script2.sh which then is 5 minutes before script3.sh. If that shouldn't be possible, any way to ensure that they aren't executed within 5 minutes of each other would suffice.

I did see solutions to do this with a script or otherwise programmatic. If cron can't be used for the job a "not possible" is what I'm looking for as the answer.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 48

Answers (1)

marcelm
marcelm

Reputation: 1089

*/30 is equivalent to 0,30. If you use the latter syntax you can simply use 5,35 for another job to offset it from the first.

For example, for three jobs you could do:

 0,30 * * * * script1.sh
 5,35 * * * * script2.sh
10,40 * * * * script3.sh

Note that if script1.sh takes longer than 5 minutes to run, there will still be overlap between script1.sh and script2.sh. If you really must avoid that, you should probably consider lock files (using e.g. flock).

Upvotes: 0

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