How To: List Cron Jobs

Today’s article is going to show you a few ways to list cron jobs on your computer. If you don’t know, cron is a way to schedule jobs in Linux. Cron goes all the way back to the mid-70s UNIX era. It’s a pretty handy tool that we’ve not yet really covered on Linux Tips.

In one of these future articles, I’ll have to explain how to add, remove, and change cron jobs. It’s easier than you might think. Importantly, even if you haven’t added any cron jobs, your system almost certainly has many of them. They’re useful for scheduling tasks and your computer does all sorts of task scheduling even if you don’t add anything to it.

In today’s article, we’ll show you how to list cron jobs by their type. By type, I mean by when they’re scheduled. Tasks are scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can schedule them at other intervals, but generally speaking the system will only use those particular intervals.

List Cron Jobs:

Like many articles, this one will also require an open terminal. The terminal is a pretty useful tool! Anyhow, you can open one pretty easily. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once  your terminal is open, we can first examine the the hourly cron jobs. It’s really easy. Just enter:

ls -la /etc/cron.hourly

You may start to notice a trend with this next one. If you want to list cron jobs by their daily status, your command would be just a little different.

ls -la /etc/cron.daily

Sure enough, if you want to list cron jobs by their weekly status, the command isn’t much different. That one is:

ls -la /etc/cron.weekly

And of course monthly is like this:

ls -la /etc/cron.monthly

See? Nice and easy. A little bite-size article that tells you how to list cron jobs.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have yet another article, this one dealing with showing you the cron jobs that you have running on your computer. These are all the tasks that are regularly scheduled. One of these days, I’ll do an article about editing them and adding them, including adding them with different interval schedules.

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