William Park via Talk wrote on 2026-01-06 00:24:

1. For cron jobs, do you use     - systemd timer/service, eg. job.timer, job.service, OR     - traditional crontab from /etc/cron.daily/job, ... ?

I use cron simply due to inertia. Because crontab entries are difficult to edit, I've moved to putting the necessary commands in a shell script and having cron run that. However, at that point I figure I ought to be using systemd.timers. More control and best of all - the answer to "what are the scheduled timer scripts' order of execution and last run results?" is *easy* to answer with `systemctl list-timers`.

2. After translating to "systemd" scripts, how is the maintenance? The timers I do have seem pretty easy: usually the service's unit file (or the script it invokes) gets edited, like my cron-invoked script.

Then, just for good measure, `systemctl daemon-reload`. Also, just for fun, there are some neat things one can do with `systemd-analyze calendar`, such as "when is the next leap year?": systemd-analyze calendar *-02-29 Original form: *-02-29 Normalized form: *-02-29 00:00:00 Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 PST (in UTC): Tue 2028-02-29 08:00:00 UTC From now: 2 years 1 month left Or, "when is the next leap year which falls on a saturday?": systemd-analyze calendar "sat *-02-29" Original form: sat *-02-29 Normalized form: Sat *-02-29 00:00:00 Next elapse: Sat 2048-02-29 00:00:00 PST (in UTC): Sat 2048-02-29 08:00:00 UTC From now: 22 years 1 month left

On 2026-01-06 03:24, William Park via Talk wrote:

Hi all,

1. For cron jobs, do you use     - systemd timer/service, eg. job.timer, job.service, OR     - traditional crontab from /etc/cron.daily/job, ... ?

2. After translating to "systemd" scripts, how is the maintenance?

--William

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I use crontab for simple one shot tasks at a specified time and tasks that need to run on an interval basis (e.g. every 5 minutes). Examples include: - apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade --d -y - some web scrapers - generate notification emails (at midnight) from a calendar system I use systemd for things i want to run, be monitored and be restarted immediately on failure., - other web scrapers - music player daemons - network status monitoring agents I have written Simple and standalone -> crontab More complex, with startup dependencies -> systemd -- Michael Galea