We’ll show you, how to use Linux crontab. In a few simple steps we will explain, how to automate your system tasks using crontab in Linux. The cron software utility is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems. Cron is driven by a crontab (cron table) file, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a given schedule. The crontab files are stored where the lists of jobs and other instructions to the cron daemon are kept. Users can have their own individual crontab files and often there is a system-wide crontab file (usually in /etc or a subdirectory of /etc) that only system administrators can edit.
You can use cron to automatically run scripts within a specified period of time, create a backup of your databases or other important files, monitor the services running on your server and many other things. Let’s start