How I Schedule Jobs using Crontab

Cron is a program that allows Unix users to automatically run tasks (scripts, commands, software…) at a pre-defined date and time.
These tasks are called cron jobs and can be used for example backing up data, sending alerting email, run scripts…

The cron jobs can be scheduled to run by a minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week, or any combination of these.

Everything we are going to do will be done on the command line. So open your terminal.

The following command line displays the contents of the cron table for the current user:
crontab -l

Here, we have only 6 jobs running for this user.
All the lines that start with ‘#’ are commented and are only used to give additional information to readers.

Each job respects following rules:

So in our example:

To edit the content of the cron table, you can use the following command line : crontab -e
This command launches the default editor. The editor then displays the current cron table.
When crontab is launched for the first time, the table is blank.

The command crontab -r has the effect to delete the cron table.

Thanks for reading! Happy coding.

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