Cron Job Every 5 Minutes (Crontab)

This page will help you quickly and easily set up a cron job to run every 5 minutes.

The Cron Job/Crontab

To have your task run at this frequency, use the following cron:

*/5 * * * *

This cron command translates to the following (in Human-Readable format):

“Every 5 minutes.”

What is a Cron Job & Crontab?

A cron job is a task that is scheduled to run at a specific time or interval. Cron jobs are typically used for maintenance tasks, such as backing up data or updating software.

A crontab is a file containing commands and instructions for the cron daemon to execute. The crontab is used to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates.

Cron Fields

Every cron job uses five fields. Here is an explanation of what each field does in this cron, which runs “every 5 minutes“:

Field 1: (*/5) indicates that the task will be run every 5 minutes.

Field 2: (*) indicates that the task will be run every hour.

Field 3: (*) indicates that the task will be run every day of the month.

Field 4: (*) indicates that the task will be run every month.

Field 5: (*) indicates that the task will be run every day of the week.

 

FUN FACT: A common use for cron jobs is to generate periodic reports – for example, you could set up a cron job to automatically generate and send out a report on website traffic statistics every week..

Use Cases

You might want to set up a crontab or cron job to run every 5 minutes for several reasons, including:

• Automatically backing up a database
• Checking for new email messages
• Generating reports
• Clearing out temporary files
• Restarting a web server

Similar Cron Jobs

You might also want to run a crontab:

• every 6 minutes
• every 26 minutes
• every minute
• every 10 minutes
• every minute between 1:00 am and 7:00 am
• every minute between 6:00 am and 12:00 pm

FUN FACT: Cron is one of the most powerful tools available on a Linux system – use it wisely!.

Wrapping Up

In this article, you learned how to set up a cron job that runs every 5 minutes. Please share this page with friends and colleagues if you find it useful.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment below.

If you are looking for cron jobs that run at certain minutes, hours, days, weekdays, or months, or if you are looking for miscellaneous cron jobs, then check out our relevant sections, or visit our crontab cheat sheet for a list of hundreds of popular cron jobs.