cron

Long-term owners

It is succesfully flying 51 year. And will work next 50 years.

Jun 2026 · comment

I've been using for 20+ years where is still prefer to have an LLM configure it for me

Feb 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• systemd timersRecommended as a cleaner cron replacement with per-job logs, explicit time zones and easy testing. Main caveat: complex schedules are as hard to write as anywhere else.40recommend
• Slurm Workload ManagerPeople recommend it for running and scheduling jobs efficiently on HPC clusters, with a long production record. Critics say its APIs change often between versions.10recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 85 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

2. I know that I just have to edit /etc/cron or throw any executable file into /etc/cron.d/monthly and it will work

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

3. I prefer the deterministic behavior of cron, the script will run when it is specified to run

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

4. 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders”

5. We have used and still use cron for decades. It does it's job and does it well.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

6. the handling of the "day of week" column is a terrible wart on the rules

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

7. it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Schedule Claude Code tasks on the web”

8. cron looks to be soo straightforward and easier to use than this

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

9. It is succesfully flying 51 year. And will work next 50 years.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

10. covers 99% of use cases unless you need something REALLY fancy

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

11. it served us well within its very clear limitations

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

12. it's a deterministic environment and mostly clean

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

13. we have had cron perfectly working for _decades_

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Systemd Linger”

14. cron that has served us just fine for decades

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

15. But for scheduling cron is still the best.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

16. A tool designed for a particular job

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

17. It does one thing and does it well.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

18. One line in /etc/crontab and done.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

19. 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

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

20. Hours upon hours wasted trying to troubleshoot crons that weren't working due to some stupid obscure issue

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

21. it's too much work to reason about how the cron environment differs from my normal working environment

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked”

22. I do not believe there was one time that I ever got a cron job to work properly in the first attempt.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

23. Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Choose Boring Technology (2015)”

24. it's annoying with cron to have to temporarily set the trigger two minutes into the future

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

25. I forgot cron evaluates the command with the shell (which has its own set of issues...)

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

26. I can never remember what those numbers mean and I need to Google almost every time.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

27. you can't use ~ or $HOME in the path, you have to write out the full absolute path.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

28. Ambiguous $PATH settings make cron script execution difficult to predict

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

29. If you have a job you need scheduled in a different timezone, dump a new file in /etc/cron.d, alter its CRON_TZ variable and go to town

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

30. a simple script (curl calling steam API and sending a notification if the price is set) + cron handle the job perfectly

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS”

31. systemctl start foo.service starts the command inside with the same environment as when the timer fires

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

32. no additional software required, since your machine already has cron, find and xargs on it

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root”

33. I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?”

34. I've been using for 20+ years where is still prefer to have an LLM configure it for me

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"”

35. the hell is going to freeze before I switch to their timers instead of cron.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Systemd v259”

36. cron has the @reboot option which I use for a few scripts and works great.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

37. Once you learn to redirect output to loggers - it works just fine.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

38. cron is easier for easy stuff but harder for hard stuff

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

39. But luckily it's pre-printed in the crontab as comments

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”

40. I'm still not seeing something that warrants a rewrite.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough”