Cron is a scheduling utility in Linux distributions that can be used to executes tasks at specified intervals. It allows you to run almost any commands or scripts at a specific time and date, or at a recurring interval.
Cron is a very useful tool for a system administrators to automate repetitive tasks of any sort, such as system updates, sending emails, checking system resource usage, creating backups, and so on. Realistically, anything that can be automated can be added to Cron so that it executes without any user involvement.
Cron runs in the background and constantly checks the /etc/crontab file, and the /etc/cron.*/ and /var/spool/cron/ directories. Each user has their own separate crontab file.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to create and run Cron jobs on a Linux VPS. The same steps should work on almost all Linux machines, regardless of whether it’s a server or a desktop computer.