Cron every 6 hours

Add this schedule to your crontab

Open your user crontab with crontab -e and add this entry. Replace the command with an absolute path, then confirm it with crontab -l. Cron runs with a smaller environment than your interactive shell.

0 */6 * * * /path/to/your-command

Cron starts commands but does not alert you when a job fails or never runs. Monitor this cron job to detect silent failures. Guarded entries intentionally skip nonmatching dates; configure monitoring for the intended schedule, not the guard’s daily or weekly checks.

Read the cron fields

Unix crontab has five fields: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), and day of week (0–7, with 0 and 7 representing Sunday). Seconds-based syntax adds a seconds field (0–59) at the start.

• * matches any value; , separates values; - defines an inclusive range.
• / steps through values within a field. */15 matches minutes 0, 15, 30 and 45.
• When both day fields are restricted, Unix cron matches either day field, not both.

Read the crontab manual or the complete cron job guide for setup and troubleshooting.

Related cron schedules

• Every hour
• Every 2 hours
• Every 3 hours
• Every 4 hours
• Every 8 hours
• Every 12 hours