Tutorials on cron [closed]

Answer 1

All about Cron on one page

An excellent, and very thorough tutorial. Covers all aspects of cron, from background to practical examples. If it's not on this page, it's not worth knowing.

also covers similar/related tools anacron, at and batch, as well as the general concepts of time in Unix.

Answer 2

I have never found a truly comprehensive cron tutorial, to be comprehensive it needs to explain crontab lines like:

2-57/5 *   *  *  * $COMMAND

I have not seen one that does so properly.

http://www.corntab.com/pages/crontab-gui is a somewhat useful web utility for building crontabs. It does not explain the concepts but lets you build a crontab line by selecting the times you want without having to remember the syntax. Unfortunately it fails at more complex examples but is nonetheless a useful tool.

http://cronwtf.github.com/ is a somewhat useful web utility for parsing crontab lines and giving an english explanation of when the command will run. It does not deal properly with my example above.