Cron best practices
▻https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/cron-best-practices
The time-based job scheduler cron(8) has been around since Version 7 Unix, and its crontab(5) syntax is familiar even for people who don’t do much Unix system administration. It’s standardised, reasonably flexible, simple to configure, and works reliably, and so it’s trusted by both system packages and users to manage many important tasks.
However, like many older Unix tools, cron(8)‘s simplicity has a drawback: it relies upon the user to know some detail of how it works, and to correctly implement any other safety checking behaviour around it. Specifically, all it does is try and run the job at an appropriate time, and email the output. For simple and unimportant per-user jobs, that may be just fine, but for more crucial system tasks it’s worthwhile to wrap a little extra infrastructure (...)