Comparing systemd timers with cron
The cron family of scheduling utilities has been a part of Unix and Unix-like operating systems since May 1975. In the 1980s, as part of Richard Stallman's new free software movement, several free-as-in-speech versions of cron were created. Paul Vixie, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, created his own free version in 1987. Vixie's version became the most widely used version in the Linux world. (In fact, if you look at the cron man page, you'll still see Paul Vixie's name in the Authors section at the bottom.)
A big advantage of cron is its sheer simplicity. All it takes to create a cron job is one simple line of code, which would look something like this:
Figure 7.1 – An example of a cron job
In this very simple example, which I took from one of my ancient CentOS 6 virtual machines, I'm running a simple task at 25 minutes and 55 minutes past every hour of every day. Twice every...