How do you run a crontab in Cygwin on Windows?

Question

Some cygwin commands are .exe files, so you can run them with the standard Windows Scheduler, but others don't have an .exe extension so can't be run from DOS (it seems like).

For example I want updatedb to run nightly.

How do I make cron work?

Answer 1

I figured out how to get the Cygwin cron service running automatically when I logged on to Windows 7. Here's what worked for me:

Using Notepad, create file C:\cygwin\bin\Cygwin_launch_crontab_service_input.txt with content no on the first line and yes on the second line (without the quotes). These are your two responses to prompts for cron-config.

Create file C:\cygwin\Cygwin_launch_crontab_service.bat with content:

@echo off
C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin
bash  cron-config < Cygwin_launch_crontab_service_input.txt

Add a Shortcut to the following in the Windows Startup folder: Cygwin_launch_crontab_service.bat

See http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1401-startup-programs-change.html if you need help on how to add to Startup. BTW, you can optionally add these in Startup if you would like:

Cygwin

XWin Server

The first one executes

C:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat

and the second one executes

C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c /usr/bin/startxwin.exe

Answer 2

You need to also install cygrunsrv so you can set cron up as a windows service, then run cron-config.

If you want the cron jobs to send email of any output you'll also need to install either exim or ssmtp (before running cron-config.)

See /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron-*.README for more details.

Regarding programs without a .exe extension, they are probably shell scripts of some type. If you look at the first line of the file you could see what program you need to use to run them (e.g., "#!/bin/sh"), so you could perhaps execute them from the windows scheduler by calling the shell program (e.g., "C:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe -l /my/cygwin/path/to/prog".)