How do you run a crontab in Cygwin on Windows?

hat tip http://linux.subogero.com/894/cron-on-cygwin/

Start the cygwin-setup and add the “cron” package from the “Admin” category.

We’ll run cron as a service by user SYSTEM. Poor SYSTEM therefore needs a home directory and a shell. The “/etc/passwd” file will define them.

$ mkdir /root
$ chown SYSTEM:root /root
$ mcedit /etc/passwd
SYSTEM:*:......:/root:/bin/bash

The start the service:

$ cron-config
Do you want to remove or reinstall it (yes/no) yes
Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [ ] ntsec
Do you want the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) no
Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? (yes/no) yes

Local users can now define their scheduled tasks like this (crontab will start your favourite editor):

$ crontab -e  # edit your user specific cron-table HOME=/home/foo
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:$PATH
# testing - one per line
* * * * *   touch ~/cron
@reboot     ~/foo.sh
45 11 * * * ~/lunch_message_to_mates.sh

Domain users: it does not work. Poor cron is unable to run scheduled tasks on behalf of domain users on the machine. But there is another way: cron also runs stuff found in the system level cron table in “/etc/crontab”. So insert your suff there, so that SYSTEM does it on its own behalf:

$ touch /etc/crontab
$ chown SYSTEM /etc/crontab
$ mcedit /etc/crontab
HOME=/root
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:$PATH
* * * * *   SYSTEM touch ~/cron
@reboot     SYSTEM rm -f /tmp/.ssh*

Finally a few words about crontab entries. They are either environment settings or scheduled commands. As seen above, on Cygwin it’s best to create a usable PATH. Home dir and shell are normally taken from “/etc/passwd”.

As to the columns of scheduled commands see the manual page.

If certain crontab entries do not run, the best diagnostic tool is this:

$ cronevents

You have two options:

1. Install cron as a windows service, using cygrunsrv:

   cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -n
   
   net start cron
   

   Note, in (very) old versions of cron you need to use -D instead of -n

2. The 'non .exe' files are probably bash scripts, so you can run them via the windows scheduler by invoking bash to run the script, e.g.:

   C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l -c "./full-path/to/script.sh"
   

You need to also install cygrunsrv so you can set cron up as a windows service, then run cron-config.

If you want the cron jobs to send email of any output you'll also need to install either exim or ssmtp (before running cron-config.)

See /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron-*.README for more details.

Regarding programs without a .exe extension, they are probably shell scripts of some type. If you look at the first line of the file you could see what program you need to use to run them (e.g., "#!/bin/sh"), so you could perhaps execute them from the windows scheduler by calling the shell program (e.g., "C:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe -l /my/cygwin/path/to/prog".)