Add A New Cron Job

To create a new job to Cron we will modify the “crontab”. This is a table that contains the list of jobs that Cron will monitor and run according to it’s details. To edit it we use the command :

Each user of the system (ie “pi”) can have its own Crontab but in this case we want to add it as an admin so we prefix our “crontab -e” command with “sudo”. You should see something that looks like this :

Using your cursor keys scroll to the bottom and add the following line :

This tells Cron that every boot (or reboot or start-up) we want to run Python with the script MyScript.py. The “&” at the end of the line means the command is run in the background and it won’t stop the system booting up as before.

Your screen should look something like this :

To save these changes click “CTRL-X”, then “Y” and finally “Return”. You should now be back at the command prompt.

To start testing you can now reboot using :