Basic cron......

[Anon]

Hi y'all.

I have been programming a bit with PHP and PERL etc for a while now and every once and awhile I see someone say something like "...use a cron..." or "...can I do this with cron..." etc etc...

I was wondering if someone would mind telling me what exactly cron is as I think it would be very useful on my site.

If not, thanks anyway.

🙂

[Anon]

'cron' is the unix system for executing programs at specified times. You create entries in a 'crontab' file, named after your user name and placed in a magic directory, and then every minute 'cron' will look at your file and see if there are any commands to be executed.

[Anon]

If you have access to a Linux/UNIX box, the following manpages will be usefull:
cron(8)
crontab(1)
crontab(5)
The system has user tools to make administration of crontabs simple.
Also of interest might be how to do shell scripting in php, which i saw covered in a previous article on this site.

[Anon]

If you are stuck on NT, the "AT" service is the nearest equivalent. It too allows you to submit jobs to be run at a scheduled time. CRON is more flexible, but AT will do in a crunch.