How to run a crontab job every week on Sunday?

In order to create a crontab job to run every Sunday, we first need to explore and understand what a crontab job is.

A crontab is nothing but a list of commands that we can run during a cron job. A cron job is a utility that schedules automatic execution of commands at specific times.

Creating a Crontab Job

We can start a cron job with the help of bash script by following the commands shown below −

crontab -e

This will open a file which you can edit, insert the cron job shell script in the above file and then close that file.

Crontab Syntax

Just insert the code shown below in the above file

* * * * * sample.sh

The above command contains 5 asterisks, where each * indicates the time field and then follows the script. We have the script which we want to run as a cron job. In the sample.sh we need to write the following command to make the environment variables available to it.

Now we understand how we can create a crontab job, it is time to understand what these * actually mean and how we can replace their values to solve our particular question.

Cron Time Fields

The five asterisks in the above command actually have a separate meaning attached to them. These mainly mean −

Running Jobs Every Sunday

If we want to run a crontab job every Sunday then we have three possible combinations that we can run. These are −

5 8 * * 0

5 8 * * 7

5 8 * * Sun

The 5 8 in the above crontab job command stands for the time of the day when this will happen: 8:05 AM.

Examples

It should be noted that we need to append our script that we need to run after any of the above commands we choose.

The final command should look something like this −

5 8 * * 0 /path/to/script.sh

Here are more examples for different times on Sunday −

# Run at midnight every Sunday
0 0 * * 0 /path/to/backup-script.sh

# Run at 2:30 PM every Sunday
30 14 * * Sun /path/to/weekly-report.sh

# Run every 30 minutes on Sundays only
*/30 * * * 7 /path/to/monitor.sh

Key Points

• Sunday can be represented as 0, 7, or Sun

• Always use absolute paths for scripts to avoid execution issues

• Use crontab -l to list existing cron jobs

• Use crontab -r to remove all cron jobs for the current user

Conclusion

Running a crontab job every Sunday requires setting the day of week field to 0, 7, or Sun while specifying the desired time. This allows for automated weekly tasks like backups, reports, or system maintenance to run reliably every Sunday.