Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Scheduling Tasks

There are three ways to schedule commands in Ubuntu, all of which work in different ways. The first is the at command, which specifies a command to run at a specific time and date relative to today. The second is the batch command, which is actually a script that redirects you to the at command with some extra options set so your command runs when the system is quiet. The last option is the cron daemon, which is the Linux way of executing tasks at a given time.