How to install crontab on Centos

72
votes

I am familiar to setup the cron scheduler using crontab -e command on my centos. But today I found one of my centos servers doesn't have this command

I have tried to install this using yum install crontab but no luck. Then I tried yum install crontabs and it installed something

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size 
=============================================================================
Updating:
 crontabs                noarch     1.10-11.el5      base              7.0 k

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      0 Package(s)         
Update       1 Package(s)         
Remove       0 Package(s)         

Total download size: 7.0 k
Is this ok [y/N]:

But still the crontab command doesn't work. If I do cat /etc/crontab then it shows below thing

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

# run-parts
40 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
54 1 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
14 3 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
38 1 16 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

What should I do to have crontab on that particular server? I am using CentOS release 5.2 (Final).

grep on cron shows:

[root~]# ps -ef | grep cron
root     24022 24001  0 19:07 pts/1    00:00:00 grep cron

starting cron service returns: 

[root~]# service cron start
cron: unrecognized service
1
linuxcroncentoscrontab

1 Answers

144
votes

As seen in Install crontab on CentOS, the crontab package in CentOS is vixie-cron. Hence, do install it with:

yum install vixie-cron

And then start it with:

service crond start

To make it persistent, so that it starts on boot, use:

chkconfig crond on

On CentOS 7 you need to use cronie:

yum install cronie

On CentOS 6 you can install vixie-cron, but the real package is cronie:

yum install vixie-cron

and

yum install cronie

In both cases you get the same output:

.../...
==================================================================
 Package         Arch       Version         Repository      Size
==================================================================
Installing:
 cronie          x86_64     1.4.4-12.el6    base             73 k
Installing for dependencies:
 cronie-anacron  x86_64     1.4.4-12.el6    base             30 k
 crontabs        noarch     1.10-33.el6     base             10 k
 exim            x86_64     4.72-6.el6      epel            1.2 M

Transaction Summary
==================================================================
Install       4 Package(s)