The cron Daemon (Demo)
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Video Transcription
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>> Hey, Cybrarians, and welcome back to
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the Linux Plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor, Rob Goelz.
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In today's lesson, we're going to
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be covering the cron Daemon.
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Upon completion of today's lesson,
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you're going to be able to understand
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and realize the importance of
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the cron Daemon and how it's used
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>> in process scheduling.
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>> We're going to talk about and understand
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how the cron and anacron daemons work.
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Then we're going to locate the files and
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directories that cron and anacron use.
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The cron daemon or daemon is what is
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used in Linux to handle job scheduling.
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That word cron comes from
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the Greek word for time, chronos.
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Now the cron daemon runs a job on a fixed schedule,
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and jobs that we see running regularly are
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generally foundational processes,
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and they use cron schedules to
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ensure that they run at regular intervals.
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We're going to see this in
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the demo at the end of the lesson.
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Now the cron daemon, crond,
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is configured to start up along with the system.
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Crond runs in the background and
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actually checks these things called user cron tables,
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using utility crontab,
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which we're going to discuss in the next lesson.
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Crond also uses something called the etc crontab file,
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which is the global system crontab.
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That is used basically just to run
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scripts at very specific intervals.
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Those intervals are cron.hourly, daily, weekly.
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Actually, these are directories,
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etc/cron.hourly, cron.daily,
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cron.weekly, cron.monthly,
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are just places where you can place a task or a script.
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Then when those times come up,
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these things will be run at that specific time.
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A system task script or any script can be placed
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into these directories and will
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run at those specified times,
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and we'll see that in the demo.
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Now the other thing to talk about here is anacron,
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because in some Linux distributions alongside cron,
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you also have this thing running called anacron.
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You might be asking why.
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Well, what happens if
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a job is scheduled to run and the system is down?
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This is a very good question,
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and it really depends on what you're running.
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If you're running cron, the job doesn't run.
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The system's down.
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If you're running anacron,
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it will run the missed jobs when the system comes up,
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because it's going to look at the timestamp on
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the files in the directory in var/spool/anacron,
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and also at the etc/anacrontab file
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to determine when the job should have been run,
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and when it should re-run the job if it was missed.
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Note, the anacron is not
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explicitly called out on the Linux Plus objectives,
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but you're going to see it in real life.
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I wanted to explain what it was.
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Let's have a look at all of these files and directories
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mentioned with some demo time.
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Here we are in our demo environment,
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and the first thing that we're going to do is take
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a look at etc/crontab,
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which is, again, that global default crontab file
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that's used to schedule things.
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This job definition example at the top is very helpful.
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You can see the layout of how
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this scheduling in cron is setup.
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We're going to come back to that in
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the next lesson in a lot more detail.
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But just in general, we can see from left to right,
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a job definition is set up
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by the minute, then the hour,
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then the day of month,
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the month, and the day of the week.
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We'll talk about that as we go through here.
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The etc/crontab file, I said,
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is just used to run the job scripts
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contained in the specific interval directories.
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The interval directories are things like cron.daily,
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cron.weekly, cron.hourly,
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and so on and so forth.
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For instance, if we look at this
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cron.hourly setting right here,
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this schedule, it's set to run every 17 minutes
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because this is 17 minutes and
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the star indicates every time.
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So 17 minutes of every hour,
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every day of every month,
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every month, and every day of every week.
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If we go down and we look at cron.daily,
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this is scheduled to run at 25 minutes after the hour,
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at 6:00, which was 6:00 AM
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>> because this is 24 hour time.
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>> You can see right here, 0-23.
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This is 6:25 AM, every day,
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is when the cron.daily script
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runs or anything in this cron.daily directory runs.
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Then the same thing is true here of
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cron weekly, and cron monthly.
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Cron weekly runs on
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Sunday because it says the seventh day is zero
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or seven at 6:47 AM, and so on and so forth.
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Let's go ahead and get out of there.
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Before we leave this, you might be asking the question,
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looking at this, why do we care?
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You might need to adjust this.
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If you're doing something,
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or running something in this file and it
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happens to bump into a backup window,
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or another important process,
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you may need to go in here and
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change the scheduled time to
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ensure that that doesn't bump
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into somebody and cause issues.
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Also inside of here,
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we can see that these are all really using anacron.
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Usr/sbin/anacron. Let's take a look at
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the anacron file itself.
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We can take a look at that by going to
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less etc/anacron tab.
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This file does a pretty terrible job
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of explaining these columns.
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But the columns here are the period,
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the delay, the job identifier,
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and then the command.
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For instance, here we can see that the cron
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daily has a recurrence of daily.
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The period is one.
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But we see cron weekly has recurrence of
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seven because it's every seven days.
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Then the delay here, this
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is a really important thing here.
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It tells you how long the delay is in
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minutes that anacron will wait
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before it sees a job it skipped.
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If the system comes up and anacron says,
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"Hey the timestamps are old, what should I do?"
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It will look and see how many minutes
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to wait till it runs the job.
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Now let's take a look at some of the directories
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that cron and anacron uses.
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The next question, since we just talked about anacron,
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is how does anacron know that a job has been missed?
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Well, it looks at var/spool/anacron.
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If we look in this directory, we see that
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every file in here has a timestamp.
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It's going to look at these timestamps,
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and it's going to correspond against
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the integral directories,
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and see what stuff should be run and
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>> if it has been run.
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>> If it sees that it has been run here,
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>> it'll kick it off.
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>> Let's look at those interval directories.
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If we do an ls on etc/cron, for instance,
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cron.daily,
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we can see in this file we have
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a bunch of different scripts,
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and they do just general foundational things.
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We see this doing log rotate,
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which it's going to rotate our logs that are
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stored in the system to ensure that we don't run out
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of disk space because we're writing too many logs.
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We have the man-db command,
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which is used to update the manual database files,
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so that we always have accurate and
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>> present manual files.
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>> We're just seeing in general a lot of
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the foundational processes in
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Ubuntu are taking care of daily.
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If we were to look at the weekly,
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or monthly directories,
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we really see that these just
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basically do the same thing.
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That's cron daily, cron hourly.
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They don't really have much of anything in them.
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Cron monthly, it really just has one setting.
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Really most of what happens
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in terms of this is done through the cron daily stuff.
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I chose to show you this in Ubuntu because it
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leverages a lot of cron's scheduling,
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while Linux doesn't seem to have as much.
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But with that, we've reached the end of this lesson.
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In this lesson, we covered the importance of
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the cron daemon in process scheduling
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>> in Linux operation.
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>> Then we talked about how the
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cron and anacron daemons work.
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Finally, we saw the files and directories
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that are used by cron and anacron.
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Thanks so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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