this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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I'm not the OP, but I can explain how to use cron in like 4 sentences: Edit cron with the command crontab -e, this opens your text editor. If you want your jobs to have environment variables, put those at the top. Put this header at the top: # m h dom mon dow command It means minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week, command. Type in numbers for these values or a star which means all of them. Command is the command to be run.
You can explain timers the same way.
And then with your explanation it goes: cron job doesn't execute for reason,
crontab -llists not all jobs, someone else put cron job in whatever directory like cron.daily, you've added or removed empty line at the end and now nothing works, debian crond and redhat cronie ahave different quirks, etc., etc.I've dealt with insane cron problems for so long that switching to timers was like *whoa i don't need to suffer?*
Maybe I'm just lucky that I haven't run into insane cron problems :) I've done both, I guess I just need to do more systemd timers and get used to it. I found it so confusing and weird to set up.
I've always had either problems with schedules or problems with environment because it has it's own. Cron is fine as long as you are lucky. That isn't to say there never were problems with timers, on debian 9, I think, shipped version of systemd had a bug where systemd-analyze parsed schedule correctly and timer just shit itself. But only for some specific case I can't remeber which, but it was extremely frustrating to debug.