HowTo: Persistent Crontabs with AsusWRT Merlin

Currently (v380.64_2) there is no out-of-the-box mechanism to setup persistent crontabs which survives a system reboot. But there is a simple workaround availabe.

Your Crontab File#

First of all, create a standard crontab file and store it in your persistent JFFS partition. In this example /jffs/configs/cron

# Syntax
# MM HH DayOfMonth Month DayOfWeek <action>

# Run Backup Script at 4am
0 4 * * * /jffs/scripts/backup.sh

Setup Crontabs on startup#

To load the crontab list on boot, add the following line to your init-start script in /jffs/scripts/init-start

cp /jffs/configs/cron /var/spool/cron/crontabs/admin

That’s it!