Cron
cron is a daemon for running programs at
regular intervals. The programs and intervals are specified in a crontab
file,
which can be edited with crontab(1).
Running crontab -e
as the superuser will edit the system crontab; otherwise,
it will edit the crontab for the current user.
By default, a cron daemon is not installed. However, multiple cron implementations are available, including cronie, dcron, fcron and more.
Once you have chosen and installed an implementation,
enable the corresponding service. There
is also a generic crond
service which is maintained by the alternatives
system, but there is no real benefit in using it and just makes your setup
harder to follow.
As an alternative to the standard cron implementations, you can use
snooze(1) together with the
snooze-hourly
, snooze-daily
, snooze-weekly
and snooze-monthly
services,
which are provided by the snooze
package for this purpose. Each of these
services execute scripts in the respective /etc/cron.*
directories.