Setting cron task every day at 2am.. makes it run every minute

Question

From what I have read, and wizard generators I have used the following should run the task every day at 2am

* 2 * * * <my task here>

However, looking at the logs it has actually fired the task for each minute in the 2am hour, in other words 60 times in total. What am I doing wrong here? Or are these generators just rubbish. Thanks

Answer 1

This runs the script every minute of 2am (02:00, 02:01, 02:02 and so on):

 * 2 * * *

While This runs the script at 02:13am (of each day of each month)

13 2 * * *

 * * * * *  command to execute
 ┬ ┬ ┬ ┬ ┬
 │ │ │ │ │
 │ │ │ │ │
 │ │ │ │ └───── day of week (0 - 7) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday, 7 is Sunday again)
 │ │ │ └────────── month (1 - 12)
 │ │ └─────────────── day of month (1 - 31)
 │ └──────────────────── hour (0 - 23)
 └───────────────────────── min (0 - 59)

Answer 2

You are writing the command wrong. Try this:

0 2 * * * <task>

This version execute the task at minute 0, yours execute at all minutes (*)