Job Scheduling with Cron

Welcome!

This course is an introduction to Job Scheduling, and a presentation of Cron.

After describing the difference between tasks, jobs and processes, we will see some examples of free Job Schedulers, verifying the best scenario for their usage. We will also see the difference between Job Schedulers and Workflow Orchestrators.

I am combining theory and practice, sharing first-hand experience, gained in decades of experience working with Linux systems.

At the end of this course, you will be able not only to define cronjobs to automate the execution of your tasks, but you will have a good understanding of possible pitfalls affecting this tool, and how to address, or avoid them.

Anybody can follow this course, but to properly adopt these concepts you will need a good understanding of Linux basics, such as defining and running scripts, giving them rights, go in super user mode.

Here what you will find

– From tasks and processes to job scheduling: we will see main differences, and that sometimes concepts may overlap.

– Example of job schedulers and usage scenarios: a comparison between free schedulers.

– Cron introduction: what is crontab? and cronjob? what about crond?

– Cron installation and operation: ensuring our Cron is ready to run our jobs.

– Cron grammar: setting up the job to run when needed.

– Cron logs and script output redirection: to have the means to understand what is happened, and when.

– Cron and environment variables: ensure our scripts will find all what they need.

Extra content:

– Questions

– Cron commands sheet

– Sources and additional articles