What is Cron?

Cron is a time-based scheduler on Unix-like systems. A cron expression has five fields — minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week — that together define when a job runs, such as */5 * * * * for every five minutes.

Cron is used to automate recurring tasks like backups, report generation, and cleanup jobs. Many platforms and libraries reuse the same expression syntax.