Crontab

In my experiments to get my eeepc to be a recording device for the walks I was doing as part of my ‘Going Solo’ residency in Hathersage, I needed to run a script at a regular interval. The crontab is a way of doing this for a linux system. My eeepc runs Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10).

In the terminal:
crontab -e edits the crontab
crontab -l lists the crontab

this is an example of a crontab entry - runs the script every 5 minutes in the hour i.e. 13:00, 13:05, 13:10…
*/5 * * * * ~/bash_scripts/capture.sh

When you Exit, it asks you to save the file to a temporary locatoin. Don’t worry, this will update the crontab when you exit. You can check this with crontab -l in the terminal to see your changes

see Capture bash script for more about the script this crontab entry points to.