16 engineers on Hacker News describe using cron first-hand: 1 endorse it, 1 regret it, 0 are mixed.
“systemd's triggered units absolutely destroy cron. Manually running a job ... guarantees the same environment, whereas cron has no similar capabilities.”
regret · production · placatedmayhem · 2022-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“came back to System V and cron.”
endorse · personal · vander_elst · 2021-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“each night I had a cron job that would update a checked out copy of the sources on the git side”
neutral · production · e40 · 2026-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have a crontab that pops up a box every hour and I type in what I'm working on.”
neutral · personal · physicles · 2023-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we pipe stdout things to syslog via logger(1) to record each run in cron”
neutral · production · throw0101a · 2020-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“old-school cron launched Python utility scripts, and that works nicely.”
neutral · personal · blunte · 2017-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using certbot to automatically update my cert for about a year now with cron.”
neutral · personal · 1 yr · ranger207 · 2016-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we replaced most of our cron jobs with celery”
neutral · production · St-Clock · 2015-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just run "vnstat -i eth0 -tr" every minute with cron and log that 5 second average result”
neutral · personal · yc1010 · 2015-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think the end solution was something like 'every minute run PHP X from cron, which checks if there are jobs'”
neutral · production · contingencies · 2015-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wrote a cron job to periodically pull down my latest emails and back them up (encrypted).”
neutral · personal · Simucal · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've got a cron job that runs regularly to combine them into daily files, gzip them”
neutral · production · sehrope · 2013-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For those interested in doing monitoring outside of the process itself, we run this command every minute via cron”
neutral · production · eminh · 2013-02-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use monit combined with a number of helper bash scripts running in cron.”
neutral · production · jberryman · 2010-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Basically cron running a script that bills whoever needs to be billed for the proper amount.”
neutral · production · pavel_lishin · 2010-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I edited my crontab on ym home machine... I woke up to find out my cronjobs hadn't been running for the past 9 hours.”
neutral · production · code_duck · 2010-05-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?