A Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

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Cron is one of the most useful utility that you can find in any Unix-like operating system. It is used to schedule commands at a specific time. These scheduled commands or tasks are known as “Cron Jobs”. Cron is generally used for running scheduled backups, monitoring disk space, deleting files (for example log files) periodically which are no longer required, running system maintenance tasks and a lot more. In this brief guide, we will see the basic usage of Cron Jobs in Linux.

The typical format of a cron job is:

Minute(0-59) Hour(0-24) Day_of_month(1-31) Month(1-12) Day_of_week(0-6) Command_to_execute

Just memorize the cron job format or print the following illustration and keep it in your desk.

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