IOUG Tips & Best Practices Booklet 2013 - (Page 31)

Cron Jobs: Best Practices and Troubleshooting By Yong Huang UNIX cron dates back to late 1970s, according to the Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron#History). Its maturity and robustness are unmatched by any other scheduling facility. This short tip discusses aspects of scheduling a cron job that are not obvious to common users and suggests best practices. It assumes LINUX as the operating system, unless otherwise noted. Cron Environment By far the most common problems with a cron job are related to its minimal environment setting. You can see the cron job environment after running this job: