Linux 101 : Systemd timers - the "cron" of systemd -

Systemd timers are the equivalent of the well-known "cron" program for scheduling tasks and programs.

To view the list of timers on a systemd system, we use the below command:

We can see that we have a bunch of timers enabled.

To have more information about the systemd timers, we use the below command:

Below is a short description of the above fields:

We could view information about the - apt-daily-upgrade.service - timer for example using the below command:

The monotonic timer:

The monotonic method configures a job to be triggered after a certain event.

Below is a unit file with a [Timer] section:

This above timer activates the "service_1.service".

OnBootSec : tells the service to run 10 minutes after the system starts.
OnUnitInactiveSec : tells the timer to run the "service_1.service" one hour after its last "run".
Unit : this field is optional since the timer runs a service that has the same name as the timer. We use it when we give the service a different name from the timer.

The real-time timers:

The real-time timer is used to run a job on a given date and time.

For example, we could have:

OnCalendar : Sets the job to run at a set interval, for example weekly means every "Monday".
AccuracySec: set a delay or an interval during which a job could run.
Persistent=true : for example makes the job persistent, the job will be run at boot time if the machine happens to be down when the job is scheduled.

Examples of real-time timers:

To run a job on the third of April, we use the below parameter:

To run a job on the sixth, fifteenth and twentieth of every month at 17:00, we use the below:

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