cron

CRON is a daemon which keeps running and gets activated at a said interval (time period). Cron helps store owners to set up and schedule commands which will run periodically at set time and date.

NOTE: the software’s (for instance, a website statistics or a content management system) documentation often asks you to schedule a cron job on your web server. For example, various Magento services such as “Sending Newsletter”, Cleanup with logs, Cleanup cache, Customer notification, etc. require a mechanism where store owners can set up and schedule commands to run periodically.

Most of the web hosts have their own set of task scheduler; you can ask and verify the task scheduler from your webhost. You can see the example of such tool in the CPanel on the following image:

The basic format of a crontab schedule consists of 6 fields, placed on a single line and separated by spaces, formatted as follows:

minute hour day month day-of-week command-line-to-execute

The acceptable values for each of the 6 fields are:

• minute – 0-59

• hour – 0-23

• day – 1-31

• month – 1-12

• day-of-week – 0-7 (where both 0 and 7 mean Sun, 1 = Mon, 2 = Tue, etc)

• command-line-to-execute – the command to run along with the parameters to that command if any

The example of the command run each hour looks like the following:

 0 * * * *