Scheduled task on reboot

Question

How can I schedule a task to run on next reboot?

I understand that we have tools like cron and at to help with scheduling. But they seem to allow scheduling at a specific time and not on specific event (like rebooting).

Answer 1

You can use @reboot - from man crontab¹:

The following formats are also recognized:
# schedule this job only once, when crond starts up
@reboot date

So you could use something like:

@reboot /path/to/yourtask

There are other Cron special keywords²:

Keyword Equivalent
@yearly 0 0 1 1 *
@daily 0 0 * * *
@hourly 0 * * * *
@reboot Run at startup.

[1] In dcron and Vixie cron

[2] http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/06/15-practical-crontab-examples/