I notice that on Debian related systems, system level crontab scripts in /etc/cron.hourly
, /etc/cron.daily
... are being gradually decommissioned in favour of systemd timers. Eg:
$ cat logrotate
#!/bin/sh
# skip in favour of systemd timer
if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
exit 0
fi
...
I presume that one goal is to gradually decommission cron and anacron. (See note 1)
For me a critical use case of cron is user defined crontabs (crontab -e
) which allow a user to schedule their own jobs to run as their own user without requiring sysadmin privileges.
Are there any features in systemd, current or planned, which allow non-admin users to schedule repetitive tasks?
Note 1:
Weakening the earlier statement somewhat I've not found any particularly good discussions except those badmouthing cron and singing the praise of systemd timers. I've found no evidence that this direction of travel has been handed down by the gods of Linux distribution. However I do notice it as a direction of travel. Therefore this statement is only based on the idea that if this is a direction of travel and with time I would expect most / all packages to eventually go the same way and make one system (cron) redundant.