What is crontab

The Cron Daemon runs on Unix based Operating Systems and, in essence, is closely similar to the Windows Task Scheduler. It allows you to post your own 'magic rules' for the useful, time sparing automation of any of the scripts you will be working with.

Cron is what enables users to schedule jobs which run automatically at a certain date or time and thus perform system administration or script related tasks. The crontab is the virtual 'scoreboard' for setting up cron jobs and represents a configuration file to which users write shell commands that run periodically at a given schedule.

The Cron Daemon is a long running process that executes commands and performs scheduled tasks at a specific date or time. The stored commands are what we call cron jobs and the utility which is used to keep a record of them is Crontab.

For your convenience we have created a visual interface for creating cron jobs. It is located under the Site Management > Crontab section of your Web Hosting Control Panel.

Learn how to set up a simple cron job in this tutorial: How to set up a cron job?