Mar 15 2008
Automating jobs with cron
cron is probably one of the most useful services in the UNIX world. It is a time-based scheduling service that executes commands at a set interval.
Most flavours of Linux should have cron bundled. Unfortunately, not every distribution has the same method of configuration. The following example is based on CentOS 5, a popular enterprise web server distribution based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The configuration file for cron is stored in /etc/crontab. This file stores a list of commands to execute at a certain time interval you set.