at, cron, and anacron
Choosing a System
Of the three scheduling systems, cron
is probably the best-known. If you want to simplify your life and learn only one system, cron
is undoubtedly the most versatile one. However, it can be needlessly complex, especially for non-root users.
If you only schedule occasional, one-time tasks, the at
family of commands should suffice for you. However, if the exact timing of tasks is irrelevant to you, then anacron
is ideal for regularly repeated tasks. In fact, some writers suggest that anacron
is the scheduler best-suited to standalone laptops and workstations.
But whichever scheduler you use, you can be confident that you are using technology that has lasted several decades and that fits well with other classic Bash commands. Any problems you encounter with any of these schedulers is likely to be an obvious one, such as a problem with permissions or environmental variables.
Perhaps the greatest proof of the utility of these three schedulers is that, despite frequent attempts, desktop versions of them have never really caught on. All three are so well-designed that a GUI offers no advantage over the original command line applications.
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