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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The syntax of systemd timers is MUCH easier to read for newbies (and everyone else, really) as it uses words instead the placement of the characters on the line to convey meaning. If you can't remember or don't know the syntax well you can still understand a systemd timer, but that is much hard for the crontab. Granted, crontab uses fewer characters, but if you only set up either once in a blue moon you'll need the docs to write either for a long time. And is backwards compatibility really an issue with either one? All major desktop and server distros use systemd, and has for a while. Fedora doesn't even include a Cron by default anymore.
If it was a distro release from the last decade I'd definitely start by checking the systemd timers, rather than the crontab.
You can to totally do this, using this systemd generator.
I will agree that it is easier to read a timer than a Cron entry, especially if you've seen neither of them before.
This is where I disagree. I very rarely setup a Cron job, but when I do, I don't need to look anywhere for docs. I run
crontab -eand the first line of the editor contains a comment which annotates each column of the Cron entry (minute, hour, dom, mon, dow). All that's left is to put in the matching expressions, and paste my command.Compare that to creating a new timer, where I need to Google a template
.serviceand.timerfile, and then figure out what to put in what fields from the docs. That's probably available in the manual pages, but I don't know which one. It's just not worth it unless I need the extra power from systemd.This is from somebody who has several systemd timers and also a few Cron jobs. I'm not a hater, just a person choosing the best and easiest choice for the job.