Ubuntu – Cron/Anacron vs. Systemd

anacroncronschedulersystemd

Linux provides three different job schedulers i.e. Cron, Anacron and Systemd-Timer. What are the benefits of Cron/Anacron vs. Systemd-Timer?

Best Answer

In favor of Cron

  • A simple one line entry /etc/crontab and your job is set to run

In favor of systemd

  • Consistent run time environment with the same environment variable set. This solves a common problem with Cron jobs: They run fine in one environment and not via cron because different PATH or other values in the environment.
  • Better logging! systemd captures STDOUT and STDERR of your job and stores it in the systemd journal.
  • Better job status. You can use systemctl status your-service to check the status of what you ran. Outside of combing logs, cron offers no structured way to query the service status.
  • Better timer status. Use systemctl list-timers to get a summary of enabled timers and see when they last ran and when they will next run.

In summary

Systemd timers have some overhead to learn and setup, but provide a number of benefits. There some packages like systemd-cron and systemd-cron-next that allow you to have cron entries converted to systemd-timers, to try to provide a best-of-both-worlds solution

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