CRON
Scheduling tasks
Want to make time for hobby projects such as uncovering the name of Doctor Who? Shashank Sharma suggests automating recurring tasks.
Shashank Sharma
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi. He collects geeky memorabilia, but wonders if sanitisers would qualify.
The Occam’s Razor principle is often paraphrased as ‘the simplest answer is often correct’. Although this has long been thought as something that applies to science, this principle can also be used to determine the best software solution to a given problem. This is why tools like Cron and At remain so popular for automating recurring tasks. Cron is used for tasks you wish to perform repeatedly, such as installing updates, or performing backups. The At utility, on the other hand, can be used to run tasks only once, at the specified time.
You can visit https://crontab. guru or https://crontab-generator.org if you need help mastering the different values used for defining cron jobs.
But that’s something that would only appeal to system administrators, we can hear some of you earnest readers complain! Although a critical skill for any administrator, automation of recurring tasks can be every bit as useful for desktop users. For example, perhaps you want your certain critical data to be backed up every day, or wish to delete the contents of the Downloads, or any other directory every week to ensure you have enough free disk space. You could perform each of these tasks manually, but the downside is that you might forget to do so every so often.