Originally published on Arelvox .

Do you find yourself running the same commands every day? Backing up files, cleaning temporary folders, or restarting a service? With cron jobs on Linux , you can schedule all of that to run automatically, without lifting a finger. In this guide, you’ll learn what cron is, how to read its syntax, and how to create your first scheduled tasks.

What Are Cron Jobs?

Cron is a background service (a daemon ) that runs commands at times you define. Each user has a file called a crontab (cron table) that lists the tasks to run and when.…