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Cron reads every line of the crontab. If the line is not a comment or an environmental variable, cron expects a correct and valid minute expression of the cronjob. If there is an invalid minute expression (e.g. a typo), cron will throw a Bad minute error.
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"/tmp/crontab.gLfS38":4: bad minute
#error on line 4
0 0 * * *
/command/to/execute
Make sure there is one cronjob per line. One cronjob should not be defined on multiple lines.
Crontabs have simple, but strict syntax rules. Every crontab file has to:
# Example of job definition:
# .---------------- minute (0 - 59)
# | .------------- hour (0 - 23)
# | | .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# | | | .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
# | | | | .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# | | | | | .---- username
# | | | | | |
# * * * * * user command to be executed
* * * * * root echo 'Hello world!'
This error may also happen when a crontab file is generated automatically and the generator failed to insert a newline character at the end of the crontab file.
Any cron job can generate output. It may be log or error messages. Regardless of the nature of the output, you may want to save this output to a file. This can be done using the `>` operator.
In this quick tutorial, we will take a look at how to set up a cron job to run at a specific time.
You may encounter this error while creating a new crontab or updating an existing one that has a syntax error.
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