It seems that several people have had trouble creating cron jobs in Ubuntu. Here is a method I found that works for me. It requires sudo access.

Tools:

The only thing you’ll need is cron and a good text editor (like nano), both of which are in the default Ubuntu install.

Method:

Create a file with your job(s) in it and save it with any filename (e.g. crontab_file). Put each job on it’s own line like so:

* * * * * sh /home/userbob/script1
* * * * * sh /home/userbob/script2

Next run crontab with sudo on the file you just created. Be sure to select your username with the -u option:

sudo crontab -u userbob crontab_file

Conclusion

And that’s it. Pretty simple, huh? I hope this helps you out. Check out the crontab page at Wikipedia for help with formatting your own cron jobs.

UPDATE:

Just to clarify, you need to check out the proper notation for crontab to determine how to write your own cron jobs and make them run when you want them to.

Another clarification. You must create a file with each cron job on a separate line and then run crontab on it to make it work. You should do this as a user using the sudo command. Don’t be running scripts as root. Don’t be doing work as root. Don’t do anything as root unless you have no other choice. Just forget that root even exists. Your life will be better.