Every backend has a few jobs nobody looks at. The nightly backup. The 9 AM report. The script that deletes old files. Each one is a single line of cron. They work fine for months. Then one day you find out the backup hasn't run since March. Nobody noticed. This post is about that one line: what it means, where to run it, and how to hear about it when it stops. What cron actually is cron - a program that runs in the background on Unix machines. It starts commands on a schedule...