[cobalt-users] Cron Issues

["Daren Cotter" <darenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, I'm now familiar with how to create cron jobs. I have something that
needs to run four times per day. Each occurrence will take about 3 minutes.
Question 1 is: Should I create a file in the cron.quarter-hourly directory
and place the commands in there, or should I just place all four commands in
the crontab.master file? I would rather just place all four commands in the
master file because each occurrence will create a new file, and I'd like to
have more control over the name of the file. Which brings me to Question 2:

The cronjob's duty will be to backup a database. I want to name the backup:

id-0808-12am.bak

Where "0808" is the date, and "12am" is either "12am", "6am", "12pm", or
"6pm". I have no idea how to do this in a cron job. Also, once per day (say
at 2am), I will need to run a script that zips these four files into one
daily file, named id-0808-backups.tar.gz, for example.

Can anyone help me?



Daren Cotter
[ Web Development ] - [ Database Administration ]
Prairie Lakes Internet
(507) 344-1318
darenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://web.lakes.com