How to set up a cron job to run an executable every hour?

Question

I need to set up a cron job that runs an executable compiled using gcc once every hour.

I logged in as root and typed crontab -e

Then I entered the following and saved the file.

0 * * * *  /path_to_executable

However, the cron job does not work.

I see that when I type /...path_to_executable I get a segmentation fault. I can only execute the executable from the folder it is located in. Is there a way I can solve this problem?

Answer 1

use

path_to_exe >> log_file

to see the output of your command also errors can be redirected with

path_to_exe &> log_file

also you can use

crontab -l

to check that your edits are saved

Answer 2

0 * * * * cd folder_containing_exe && ./exe_name

should work unless there is something else that needs to be setup for the program to run.

Answer 3

Since I could not run the c executable that way, I wrote a simple shell script that does the following

cd /..path_to_shell_script ./c_executable_name

In the cron jobs list, I call the shell script.

Answer 4

Did you mean the executable fails to run , if invoked from any other directory? This is rather a bug on the executable. One potential reason could be the executable requires some shared libraires from the installed folder. You may check environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH)

Answer 5

The right way to solve this is to find out why you're getting the segmentation fault, and fix that.