Schedule a nightly backup with cron
The backup job is misconfigured and runs far too often. Fix the crontab so it runs once a day at 02:30, graded by actually testing when the schedule fires.
Scenario
A nightly backup is supposed to run once a day at 02:30. Someone wrote the crontab wrong and now it runs every minute of the 2 AM hour: sixty backups a night, hammering the disk. Fix it.
Cron field reminder
┌── minute (0-59)
│ ┌── hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌── day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌── month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌── day of week (0-6)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * * command
Your job
Edit crontab so the job:
- fires at 02:30, every day,
- does not fire at 02:31, 03:30, or midnight, and
- runs
/usr/local/bin/backup.sh.
How it's graded
We evaluate your schedule against several times and check it fires exactly when it should, not a string match.
Teaches: cron scheduling: reading and writing the five fields correctly.
What gets checked
Your solution is verified against each of these:
- The crontab line parses
- The job fires at 02:30
- It does not fire at 02:31, 03:30, or midnight
- It runs /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
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