Edit your user's crontab to schedule tasks

01Command

$ crontab -e

02What it does

Each line has five time fields (minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week) followed by the command to run; '*' means 'every'. For example 0 4 * * 1 runs Mondays at 04:00 and */15 * * * * runs every 15 minutes. Save and exit — cron reloads the table automatically, no daemon restart needed. Verify with crontab -l, and on most systems cron emails you any command output, so check /var/mail/$USER for errors; redirect output (>/dev/null 2>&1) to silence it.

03Risk

04Undo

✓No undo needed — this command does not change persistent state.

05Sources

• crontab(5) — tables for driving cron
  man7.org · technical · 2026-09-17
  Evidence: The crontab(5) page describes the minute hour day month weekday command field format used in crontab files.
• crontab(1) — maintain crontab files for individual users
  man7.org · technical · 2026-09-17
  Evidence: The crontab man page documents '-e' as editing the current user's crontab using the editor specified by VISUAL or EDITOR.

Last verified: 2026-09-17 · Category: System & Settings

06Related solutions