alt Hacker NewsWe have used cron perfectly fine for decades and it served us well within its very clear limitations.
But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.
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After reading this article I'm convinced that what we need is systemd timers fronted by a vibe coded crontab -e emulator.
Coz it's looks crazy complicated to set them up.
Has it actually served you well? Because it hasn't served me well at all.
I am not the biggest fan of systemd, but today I will always reach for a systemd timer over cron simply due to the sheer amount of bad experiences I've had with cron. Hours upon hours wasted trying to troubleshoot crons that weren't working due to some stupid obscure issue, having to use dirty hacks to monitor for success or retry failed jobs.
A few years ago I was trying to run a very simple bash script with cron and the script just died halfway through for no reason. Nothing in logs, worked fine when run directly, but in cron it just stopped halfway through a loop. Never figured out the cause, just gave up and used a timer instead, which worked fine. Never touched cron again after that.
The ease and convenience of monitoring and troubleshooting alone are worth switching over.
> But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.
Oh nooooo... I've been so wrong. Seen the direction most Linux distro took I decided to move to VMs (VMs which runs systemd-less systems), OCI containers (where by definition PID 1 is not systemd) and now an hypervisor to run systemd Linux VM but I'm now into... An hypervisor that is precisely not Linux (so no systemd at all).
I sinned. So now maybe it's time to buy Microsoft stocks, praise Windows [ini] config files, and venere the Linux PID 1 god with its tentacles meddling with every part of the Linux system.
Or not.
> But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.
Come on, dude. That's unnecessarily polemic.
cron et al have served us for decades, yes. But that doesn't mean that cron is the solution that needs to accompany us until the heat death of the universe or year 2038, whatever comes first.
I agree, the systemd folks haven't exactly been the best when it comes to PR or when it comes to being even near feature parity with what they tried to replace. But now, they aren't just at feature parity, they surpassed plain old cron.
Maybe it is time to lay cron to rest, at least slowly.
Thank Lennart you degenerate apostates are finally starting to see the light of His glorious creation. Hallowed be thy systemd-journald.