Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

cron

Now that the basics of scheduling via at have been discussed, let's take a look at the real powerhouse for scheduling on Linux: cron. Aptly named from the Greek word chronos, which translates to time, cron is a job scheduler, which consists of two main components: the cron daemon (sometimes referred to as crond), and the crontab. The cron daemon is the background process that runs the scheduled jobs. These jobs are scheduled using the crontab, which is simply a file on the filesystem that is most often edited with a command by the same name: crontab. We'll start by looking at the crontab command and syntax.