The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. It typically automates system maintenance or administration—though its general-purpose nature makes it useful for things like downloading files from the Internet and downloading email at regular intervals. Cron is most suitable for scheduling repetitive tasks. Scheduling one-time tasks can be accomplished using the associated at utility. Cron's name originates from chronos, the Greek word for time. The actions of cron are 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 e.g. ) that only system administrators can edit. Each line of a crontab file represents a job, and looks like this:

┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)

│ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)

│ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)

│ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)

│ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;

│ │ │ │ │ 7 is also Sunday on some systems)

│ │ │ │ │

│ │ │ │ │

* * * * *

The syntax of each line expects a cron expression made of five fields which represent the time to execute the command, followed by a shell command to execute. While normally the job is executed when the time/date specification fields all match the current time and date, there is one exception: if both "day of month" (field 3) and "day of week" (field 5) are restricted (not contain "*"), then one or both must match the current day.