Run a cron job at 9 AM and 5 PM every day. Start and end of business.
Add this line to your crontab (crontab -e):
# Twice Daily (9 AM & 5 PM)
0 9,17 * * * /path/to/your/script.shAdd a curl ping to get alerted if your job fails or runs late:
# Twice Daily (9 AM & 5 PM) — with CronPing dead man's switch
0 9,17 * * * /path/to/your/script.sh && curl -s https://cronping.anethoth.com/ping/YOUR_TOKENGet alerted instantly when a 0 9,17 * * * job fails or runs late. Free for up to 3 monitors.
0 9,17 * * * mean in cron?Run a cron job at 9 AM and 5 PM every day. Start and end of business. This expression follows the standard 5-field cron syntax: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week.
Run crontab -e in your terminal and add: 0 9,17 * * * /path/to/your/command. Save and exit. Use crontab -l to verify.
Check /var/log/syslog or /var/log/cron for execution logs. For reliable monitoring, use CronPing — it alerts you when a job misses its expected schedule.
Cron uses the system timezone by default. Check with timedatectl or set TZ=UTC in your crontab for consistency across servers.