How to do a cron job every 72 minutes

Question

How would I get a cron job to run every 72 minutes? Or some not so pretty number like that?

Answer 1

You cannot directly do this from cron/crontab.

Cron jobs are run on a specific schedule, not on a specific interval.

One alternative would be to work out a schedule that approximated your "every 72 minutes" by running at midnight, 1:12, 2:24, 3:36, ..., and stretching it out to approximate hitting up at midnight. Your crontab file could specify all of these times as times to execute.

Another alternative would be to have a separate application handle the scheduling, and fire your application.