To schedule a task on given or later time, you can use the ‘at’ or ‘batch’ commands and to set up commands to run repeatedly, you can employ the cron and anacron facilities.
Cron: is a daemon used to run scheduled tasks such as system backups, updates and many more. It is suitable for running scheduled tasks on machines that will run continuously 24X7 such as servers.
The commands/tasks are scripted into cron jobs which are scheduled in crontab files. The default system crontab file is /etc/crontab, but each user can also create their own crontab file that can launch commands at times that the user defines.
To create a personal crontab file, simply type the following:
$ crontab -e
How to Setup Anacron in Linux
Anacron is used to run commands periodically with a frequency defined in days. It works a little different from cron; assumes that a machine will not be powered on all the time.
It is appropriate for running daily, weekly, and monthly scheduled jobs normally run by cron, on machines that will not run 24-7 such as laptops and desktops machines.
How Anacron Works in Linux
anacron jobs are listed in /etc/anacrontab and jobs can be scheduled using the format below (comments inside anacrontab file must start with #).
period delay job-identifier command
From the above format:
period: this is the frequency of job execution specified in days or as @daily, @weekly, or @monthly for once per day, week, or month. You can as well use numbers: 1: daily, 7: weekly, 30, monthly and N, number of days.
delay: it’s the number of minutes to wait before executing a job.
job-id: it’s the distinctive name for the job written in log files.
command: it’s the command or shell script to be executed.
