Solved: Crontab bad minute error

Cause of the error

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.

Solution

Troubleshooting

1. The error message includes a specific line number. Look at the line and look for syntax errors and typos.

   "/tmp/crontab.gLfS38":4: bad minute
   #error on line 4

1. Check for unexpected line breaks. Check the example of an unexpected line break bellow:

   0 0 * * *
   /command/to/execute

Make sure there is one cronjob per line. One cronjob should not be defined on multiple lines.

1. Make sure all comments start with # and are on separate lines.
2. Check if time schedule corresponds with the syntax rules as shown bellow

Crontab syntax

Crontabs have simple, but strict syntax rules. Every crontab file has to:

• Start whit a correct cron schedule (can be an environmental variable) or comment on every line
• Contain a username for each cron job
• Contain valid and executable shell expression
• End with a newline

# 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!'

Got an article suggestion? Let us know

Explore more

Cron Error

Solved: Cron missing newline before EOF

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.

Questions

Solved: Errors in crontab file, can't install

You may encounter this error while creating a new crontab or updating an existing one that has a syntax error.

Questions

How to save cron job output to 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.

Questions

How to set up a cron job for a specific time and date?

In this quick tutorial, we will take a look at how to set up a cron job to run at a specific time.

Questions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.