Question

Explain the benefits of crontab to Unix/Linux system administrators and provide some examples of such task they would schedule in a one page length report.

Answer 1

Explain the benefits of crontab to Unix/Linux system administrators and
provide some examples of such task they would schedule in a one page length report.

crontab:
it is being used to schedule a work at specific time/date.
it is highly configurable and simple to used.

Benefits of crontab to system administrators:

1) they no need to wake up late in night and do cleanup, backup etc activities manually.
they can use crontab to do such works.

2) critical system alert: using crontab admin can write bash script to send alert of critical uses of resources
to stakeholders via email.

3) it become easy for admin to set reminders for system upgrade and can also intergrate script for upgrade.

4) script that run at specific time for getiing any list of attackers and notify admin if found any suspects.

5) logging details of crontab tasks.

6) very easy to used , coomand based utility.

Examples of tasks using crontab:

1) system Backup:
using crontab we can perform backup at spefic interval without involving any manpower
few systems require to take backup at interval of every an hour so using crontab we can do this.

2) we can send system usage details to user at specific time or any limit that breaches, in another words
it can be used for monitoring the system.

3) it can be used to watch on firewall and report to admin if any attack happened.

4) it can be used to run any script in background for performing any kind of tasks.

5) it can be used to removing the temp files from system, many times
system storage get exhausted by temp files and cleaning of such files can be done
by crontab that will remove the temp files/folders from system
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