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Why won't my crontab work?
This is an ongoing problem on Ubuntu. My BIOS is configured to start my computer after midnight to avail of unlimited downloads, the crontab is supposed to kick in with root access and download and install the updates but it doesn't seem to run.
I created the following crontab with the sudo prefix to get root access, see if you can see what might have gone wrong.
10 0 * * * /usr/lib/bin/apt-get update
20 0 * * * /usr/lib/bin/apt-get upgrade
51 0 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -P --quiet now
2 Answers
- Robert JLv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
If you want to run commands automatically as root, put them directly in /etc/crontab
The format of that is similar to the 'user' crontabs, but you also need the name of the user to run the commands - ie. root - as an extra parameter on each line.
10 0 * * * root /usr/lib/bin/apt-get update
20 0 * * * root /usr/lib/bin/apt-get upgrade
51 0 * * * root /usr/sbin/shutdown -P --quiet now
Append them after the existing stuff in the file.
- Chris DLv 68 years ago
Id you created these as system crontabs (under /etc) then you need a sixth parameter for the username to run the script as.
For example:
10 0 * * * root /usr/lib/bin/apt-get update
If this is already root's own crontab then you don't need this.
Cron emails errors to the user, so you might want to check root's emails to see what cron thought happened (or didn't happen):
sudo mail -u root
