Can a full Monero node be restricted to run only at specific times?

Question

I have an ISP that provides 5000GB of data to use between 1am and 7am. Is there any way to run the full node, but run it only during that time period? I don't have any data to spare during the day, but the 5000GB is barely touched, except for a few linux torrents.

Answer 1

You can use cron to start and stop monerod at the times you want. Best is to run monerod with the --detach flag to run as daemon, then run without it but the exit command when you want to stop it:

monerod --detach monerod exit

The second line will exit the first one.

In a crontab specification:

0 1 * * * monerod --detach 0 7 * * * monerod exit

This will start monerod at 1am, and stop it at 7am. See man 5 crontab for more info about crontab. Add any further arguments to the above.