A helpful tidbit I ran across about using crontab.
If each of your cron jobs do not appear on a single line in the crontab text file, you’ll get an error like this:
"/tmp/crontab.XXXXXX.crontab":1: bad minute
errors in crontab file, can't install.
Do you want to retry the same edit?
This problem most often occurs because you’re using a text editor, such as pico, that fakes word wrapping by adding a newline when it reaches a certain column position.
Crontab delimits jobs with line breaks (newlines). Each job occupies one line. Therefore, if crontab sees anything other than an integer in the first column of a line, it throws the “bad minute” error, since the minute argument is the first one crontab encounters.
The simple fix is to go to delete the line breaks added by pico / your *nix editor. You can most easily do that by putting your cursor on the first character of each extra line, then hit the backspace key until that line is joined back up with the previous one, and repeating the process until your entire cron command is on one line..
Doug, thank you so much! I was getting completely mystified by that “bad minute” thing, and visited 3 kinds of bad advice on it before finding the right answer – yours!
Thanks for this!
Muchas gracias, problema resuelto.
Excelente explicación.
Simple solution TY