What is Cron?

cron is like a helpful assistant that can automatically do tasks for you at specific times. Imagine if you could tell your computer, “Every day at 3 PM, run this program,” and it just happens without you having to do anything – that’s what cron does. It’s a scheduler that allows you to set up a timetable for your computer to perform certain jobs, whether it’s making backups, cleaning up files, or doing other routine stuff. You just need to give it a schedule (like every day at a certain time), and cron takes care of the rest. It’s a handy way to automate tasks and make your computer work for you without you always being there to give it instructions.

How to Automate Tasks with Cron Jobs in Linux?

Tired of repeating the same tasks every day? Feeling like your computer’s to-do list is multiplying faster than dust bunnies? Well, say goodbye to manual madness and hello to cron jobs! Think of them as your robot assistants in the land of Linux, diligently taking care of those repetitive chores while you’re free to conquer bigger techy mountains.

Imagine waking up to a sparkling clean inbox (thanks to automatic email deletion) or finding your files neatly backed up every night (without lifting a finger). With cron jobs, these automation superpowers are just a few lines of code away.

Automate Tasks with Cron Jobs in Linux

Table of Content

  • What is Cron?
  • What is Crontab?
  • Starting with Crontab File
  • Crontab Initialization
  • How to List All the Cron jobs for the Current User
  • How to Create New Schedules Using Crontab
  • Cron job Syntax
  • Cron job examples

Similar Reads

What is Cron?

cron is like a helpful assistant that can automatically do tasks for you at specific times. Imagine if you could tell your computer, “Every day at 3 PM, run this program,” and it just happens without you having to do anything – that’s what cron does. It’s a scheduler that allows you to set up a timetable for your computer to perform certain jobs, whether it’s making backups, cleaning up files, or doing other routine stuff. You just need to give it a schedule (like every day at a certain time), and cron takes care of the rest. It’s a handy way to automate tasks and make your computer work for you without you always being there to give it instructions....

What is Crontab?

Crontab refers to the command-line utility that allows users to create, edit, and manage their own cron schedules. When a user wants to schedule a task using cron, they use the `crontab` command to define the schedule in their user-specific crontab file. Each user can have their own crontab, and the cron daemon reads these files to know when to execute scheduled tasks....

Starting with Crontab File

Cron jobs can be done with the root user or anyone. But the root user has admin privileges hence, we’ll go into that. To use Ubuntu Command Prompt as the administrator, we use the command:...

Crontab Initialization

You can check whether crontab is running with the command:...

How to List All the Cron jobs for the Current User

We can check the list of scheduled jobs available as shown below:...

How to Create New Schedules Using Crontab

Step 1: Open the Crontab Editor...

Cron job Syntax

In managing crontab entries, various flags serve specific purposes for adding and viewing cron jobs....

Cron job examples

Below are some examples of scheduling cron jobs....

Conclusion

As technological advancements improve at an unprecedented rate, the need for a scheduler hardcoded into the Operating System (OS) decreases considerably since all the new applications requiring mundane, repetitive tasks have an inbuilt scheduler in them. For example, system updates are scheduled automatically, or as per user specifications. This has considerably decreased the usage of Crontab....

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