# cron

36 Hacker News commenters recommended cron and 23 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 32 years (10 owners).

**Verdict:** Recommended for simple, reliable scheduled jobs with one-line config that has worked for decades. Caveat: its time format is easy to get wrong.

## Why people recommend it

- Reliable for decades, deterministic behavior (7 comments): "I prefer the deterministic behavior of cron, the script will run when it is specified to run" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371097)) "We have used and still use cron for decades. It does it's job and does it well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382118)) "it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540271))
- Simple one-line configuration (4 comments): "I don't love cron's time format - it's easy to make mistakes - but one-line, one file configuration is simple in a nice way." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381322)) "I know that I just have to edit /etc/cron or throw any executable file into /etc/cron.d/monthly and it will work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48372380)) "cron looks to be soo straightforward and easier to use than this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375141))
- Does one job well (3 comments): "it served us well within its very clear limitations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371997)) "A tool designed for a particular job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48372897)) "It does one thing and does it well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373342))
- Covers most scheduling needs (3 comments): "90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969661)) "covers 99% of use cases unless you need something REALLY fancy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383307)) "But for scheduling cron is still the best." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380163))

## What people warn about

- Environment and PATH cause failures (4 comments): "it's too much work to reason about how the cron environment differs from my normal working environment" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307554)) "I forgot cron evaluates the command with the shell (which has its own set of issues...)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392443)) "you can't use ~ or $HOME in the path, you have to write out the full absolute path." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48379784))
- Hard to troubleshoot failing jobs (3 comments): "Hours upon hours wasted trying to troubleshoot crons that weren't working due to some stupid obscure issue" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48372319)) "I do not believe there was one time that I ever got a cron job to work properly in the first attempt." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370649)) "Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290222))
- Hard-to-remember time format (3 comments): "the handling of the "day of week" column is a terrible wart on the rules" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395129)) "I don't love cron's time format - it's easy to make mistakes - but one-line, one file configuration is simple in a nice way." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381322)) "I can never remember what those numbers mean and I need to Google almost every time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383198))
- Hard to schedule relative or random times (2 comments): "In cron, you basically have to either use your configuration management to generate those times, or have a random delay script running before the command" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373376)) "it's annoying with cron to have to temporarily set the trigger two minutes into the future" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381072))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [systemd timers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/systemd-timers.md): 40 recommend
- [Slurm Workload Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slurm.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "cron", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cron/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).