• SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Cron already exists and is established as the solution in this space. It’s also used as the model for a lot of other timer services outside the Linux kernel.

        • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
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          12 hours ago

          cron is quite inadequate for condition based scheduling. Instead of million obscure ways to achieve this inside the command that cron executes, systemd timers give us a standard ONE way to do things.

          I feel like systemd timers follow unix philosophy better than cron at this day and age.

        • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
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          1 day ago

          Have you read the article? The fourth paragraph lists improvements systemd timers bring over cron:

          Cron is easy, very simple and robust mechanism to execute periodic tasks on a *nix server, and is available by default on all popular Linux distributions. However, cron suffers from some issues:

          • If the system is down when the cron needs to run, the cron will be missed

          • There is no built-in status monitoring

          • There are no built-in logs

          • If you want to execute pre/post commands (for example by pinging an external service for success/failure) you have to do it inside the script itself

          All of these issues are addressed with systemd services and timers, as the authors explains in details.