Newish to Linux and slowly learning lol. I recently got a podcast downloader working through rss with castget, works great. The command to get new eps that haven’t been downloaded is castget -c.
Is there a way to automate this, so the command runs say every day at a set time?
There are users that still swear by cron, but on modern systems a systemd timer is generally advised.
I have a modern system without built-in mission creep.
They don’t even know cron exists and you’re going to throw them to the wolves by suggesting Systemd? That’s like calling in a drone strike to swat a mosquito.
If systemd is running, as it is on the great majority of distributions, then cron is running on top of it, as just another service. It’s not an either-or situation.
It’s not. But the systemd timer has more robust logging and monitoring, and much more explicit and readable syntax.
Once you get used to systemd timers, it’s really hard to see why you wouldn’t use them if your system has systemd. Unless writing crontabs by hand makes you feel like a hacker I guess. I’m not even being totally sarcastic about that - there is a fun retro feel to cron.
I generally like their outcome, but hate the boilerplate. I think I need somewhere around 20 lines over two different files which would otherwise be a one-liner in a cron file.
Yeah. Once you spend an afternoon debugging a failing
cronjob, the 5 minutes needed to write the boilerplate starts to feel pretty ok though.I’ve never had to spend an afternoon debugging a failing systemd timer in the years since I made the switch.
cron/crontab are the general things you want to search for. They are used for running commands on a schedule, which is what you want.
You can also use systemd timers. Pick the one that your OS supports.
You can set up a cron job to run a command on a schedule that you want. Here is one of many pages that explains that How to Set Up Cron Jobs on Linux (crontab Guide)
Great, thank you. I heard about cron jobs when I first switched to Linux but got overwhelmed. Appreciate the link.
This seems way more straight forward than i remember lol. I’m on Cachy, which apparently doesn’t have cron out of the box. Just installed cronie, ran crontab -e, and if I enter:
0 6 * * * * castget -c
(with spaces between 0 6 * etc?) that’s it? It’ll run every day at 6am?
