August 6th, 2010
Cron laughs at your four winds
Another article series is up, this time concerning using cron to schedule tasks in Linux. If you need to run a script regularly (like calling Drupal's "cron.php" page nightly, or backing up a frequently-changing file every hour), then cron will serve the purpose nicely.
This is one of those topics that can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. The first article covers the simple part, so start there. If you're looking to read someone else's cron schedule in cron.d or a crontab, however, you'll want to continue to the other two articles. It can't be helped, sometimes life is complicated.
Basic Linux task scheduling with cron
Fine-grained task scheduling with cron.d
Multi-user task scheduling with crontab
Hopefully the explanations will de-mystify cron a bit and make it easier to automate some of your application maintenance.
As ever, pass your comments along if you like them, don't like them, or think they need changing. And if they baffle and confuse you, our techs are in support chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ready to help you recover.
Thanks for reading!
August 7th, 2010 at 04:50 PM Jeremy Ricketts
Yet another great set of articles. This was what originally brought me to slicehost. Keep up the great work!
August 9th, 2010 at 02:07 AM David
What’s with the intended cleverness of these blog titles? They don’t make any sense.
August 9th, 2010 at 03:00 PM Jered
Thanks, Jeremy.
And David, I have an aversion to useful blog post titles. I’ll certainly stop if it spurs more complaints, especially since most aren’t even remotely good.
This one was a Conan the Barbarian reference, as it happens.
August 10th, 2010 at 01:48 AM Jerry
Nice Article,
LOVE the Title! Your god lives underneath him! :-)
August 10th, 2010 at 02:38 PM David
“And David, I have an aversion to useful blog post titles” – that’s obvious considering the ones that have been updated in the past
August 11th, 2010 at 05:39 PM Scott McMillin
By cron, these are good articles!
August 12th, 2010 at 05:48 AM hilton
These articles are great and all but we are now dragging behind all the rest in terms of actual value – Linode now has 40% better memory for the price!