I'm currently tinkering with a process to play an internet radio stream on a certain schedule everyday.

After some research, I came up with this code for Crontab :

00 22 * * * mplayer http://listen.acertainradio.com >/dev/null 2>&1 
30 22 * * * pkill mplayer

Does It sounds correct? Also, I was wondering about the >/dev/null 2>&1 part. What would be the problem if I skip it?

Thank you,

Regards,

If you skip the redirection to /dev/null, then any output generated by the command (pkill, I assume) will be sent to your account on the system as an e-mail (which you can read from the command line with the "mail" command).

You might also want to consider placing the full paths to the mplayer and pkill command, just to ensure that whatever shell is used can find them, irrespective of whichever environment variables (i.e. PATH) are set or not.

Just went through this. May not be the best way...but here goes.

First I needed to auto-mount a USB containing the music. The magic line in /etc/fstab looks like this:
LABEL=Kiwa-Music /mnt/Music auto lazytime,nofail, 1 1

Then I did a line like this in the crontab:

55 * * * * /home/pi/mplayerup

Finally there the file:

pi@kiwa-Audio:~ $ cat mplayerup

set -x

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
Proc="mplayer"

sleep 5

ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $Proc | grep -v mplayerup 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null

if [ $? = 1 ] ;

 then cd /mnt/Music/Music
 /usr/bin/mplayer -shuffle -playlist 0-Playit.m3u 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null

fi

The set -x and sleep 5 are supposed to be commented out...dunno what's going on here.