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What Is It?

A user can synchronize jobs to execute in a UNIX or Linux environment at any desired time of day or night. The cron’s job is to spawn jobs in accordance with time, a feature made possible by the cron clock daemon. Once booted, this capability never stops until it is killed manually or when the system is halted. The cron is slaved to the system clock and awakens at one minute intervals to start scheduled jobs, which are referred to as cron jobs.

Who Is it For?

Users can schedule cron jobs to execute commands on a regular schedule, such as an automatic back up or to generate monthly reports. Or, the cron job can be run just once for a specific reason. Most users are Webmasters or site managers who use cron jobs to automate repetitive tasks. Some blog users can schedule cron jobs through add-ons or plugins that will execute jobs such as the addition of RSS feeds without the need to execute the command in the shell.

Features

When the time arrives to start a job, cron spawns a shell in which to run the job, thus allowing the job to execute independently of cron itself. A cron job executes with the identity and privileges assigned to the system user who scheduled the job. In order to know what is scheduled to run, cron reads text files called cron tables, which authorized users may generate and maintain. A cron table file is ordinary ASCII text and consists of one or more lines specifying what is to be executed and when.

New crons appeared with the onset of the GNU Project and Linux, with the most prevalent being Vixie crom. Originally coded by Paul Vixie in 1987, this cron was renamed to ISC Cron upon the release of 4.1 in January 2004. Version 3, with some minor bug fixes, is used in most Linux and BSD distributions.

Compatibility

cron is compatible only with UNIX, Unix-like, and Linux environments. Windows environments will not support this capability.

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