At some point you may find that you need a program to be run at regular intervals. Some blog applications may need to be able to do hourly weather checks or other updates and so need a cron job set up so this is done automatically.  After all, you can’t be sitting at your computer 24 hours a day just to run one file every hour and besides, these are computers – they’re supposed to make our lives easier!

In my day, cron jobs were text files that you edited and they looked a bit like this:

1 * * * * username /path/script-to-be-run-here

This is for a script to be run at one minute after the hour ever hour of every day.  You needed to know where to replace the asterisks with numbers if you wanted your script to be run on certain days and times.

Things are a bit more modern now and you can use the Cpanel’s Cron Job utility to set up a job to be run at regular intervals all with the ease of editing a web page.

View our tutorial to see how to set up your own cron job:  How to setup a Cron Job