[kwlug-disc] systemd timer VS crontab

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 03:26:11AM -0500, William Park via kwlug-disc wrote:
>1. For cron jobs, do you use
>    - systemd timer/service, eg. job.timer, job.service, OR
>    - traditional crontab from /etc/cron.daily/job, ... ?

Still using cron, both at home and at work.

At work, we've migrated a bunch of startup stuff to systemd units. This 
eliminated a bunch of code we had before for lifecycle management, and 
generally made things easier.

However, we're still just shipping cron files to /etc/cron.d/. That's 
easier to deal with -- plus it's simpler to simply stop the cron service 
during maintenance windows, rather than individual timers.

Systemd timers do offer some features and advantages cron doesn't, but 
we don't require any of those features with our current scheduled jobs. 
If we were scheduling the running of a systemd unit, it would probably 
be worth switching to timers anyway.

-- 
Chris Irwin

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
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