Cron
cron is a daemon for running programs
at regular intervals. The programs and intervals are specified in a
crontab
file, which can be edited with
crontab(1). Running crontab -e
as
the superuser will edit the system crontab; otherwise, it will edit the
crontab for the current user.
By default, a cron daemon is not installed. However, multiple cron implementations are available, including cronie, dcron, fcron and more.
Once you have chosen and installed an implementation,
enable the crond
service, which
is a symlink to the actual service (e.g. dcron
). If you install several
implementations, you can choose which one to use via
xbps-alternatives(1); this
will alter the crond
symlink appropriately. Implementation documentation
will be available in crond(8).
As an alternative to the standard cron implementations, you can use
snooze(1) together with the
snooze-hourly
, snooze-daily
, snooze-weekly
and snooze-monthly
services, which are provided by the snooze
package for this purpose. Each
of these services execute scripts in the respective /etc/cron.*
directories.