Cron and Scheduled Tasks

Part of the Linux course

You wrote a backup script and it works beautifully, right up until the evening you forget to run it. Almost everything a server does routinely is like that: rotate the logs at midnight, refresh a cache every five minutes, email a report on Monday mornings. None of it is hard, and all of it fails the moment a human is responsible for remembering.

A crontab is a small text file listing scheduled jobs. Every user has one, and a daemon reads them and fires jobs at the right minute. Edit yours with ...