Unlike other Linux based systems, “crontab -e” won’t work on the Synology NAS.
Modifying crontab and enabling the deamon
- Become root
sudo -i Edit /etc/crontabnano /etc/crontab- Restart the cron deamon by typing:
synoservice -restart crond
Note: After a shutdown or reboot, you’ll need to restart the cron deamon to enable it again.
Running tasks using a different user account
If you want to run a task under a different user than root you can do the following:
#min hour mday month wday who command
30 0,6,12,18 * * * root /bin/su -c "/var/services/homes/myuser/apps/flexget.sh" myuser
The task above will run a flexget script under the username myuser ever 4 hours.
4 responses
Hi, I’m interested about running a cronjob with a different user than root. I was wondering if my code below needs any “escape” characters? I know have have many double quotes, so maybe that’s why it is not running. */15 * * * * root /bin/su -c “filebot -rename -r -extract /volume1/download/tmp/ –output “/volume1/Video/TV Shows” –format “{n}/Season {s}/{n} {sxe} {t}” –db TheTVDB -non-strict” user1 Here’s my issue: I have a cronjob to move completed files to a different directory, but when it moves them it creates a directory under the “owner 0” (aka root). This is not good, cuz I cannot see the files in my media player on my TV :(. They must be under a user I have. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Use a cron job with the chown command to change the ownership of the produced files. Alternately use chmod to allow you to read those files (chmod 644)
What can cron do that tte Synology Task Scheduler can’t? The Synology Task Scheduler also handles some other task, like mailing errors.
Hour 0,6,12,18 is every 6 hours, not every 4. And why not use */6 in that case?