*cover image is from crontab.guru a sample of how to write cron schedule expressions.
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The way I see it, there are two ways to invoke your PHP(or any language) piece of code:
It is possible that the code you use inside any of those two ways might need a schedule depending on your business or feature needs.
Maybe you would need to trigger a database backup every lunch time everyday or every night. You can either trigger this via an HTTP endpoint, you call that on a browser or you sign in via SSH to your terminal and trigger the executable file / binary file / PHP file to run the backup code. This becomes repetitive and takes a lot of effort to a person to execute it manually. Thus, comes a tool called "Cron".
Laravel Task Scheduling comes in handy for setting up cron jobs in a human readable way, minimizing the overhead learning curve of Cron or Crontab. You only setup your scheduled tasks inside your code once and you are good to go.
<aside> 💡 You will only need to add one scheduled task to crontab that would trigger all the scheduled tasks inside your code. You may head on to Running the Scheduler
</aside>
The cron command-line utility, also known as cron job[1][2] is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs[3] (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. - Wikipedia
I remember the first time I used Cron. I accidentally ran a job every minute and I forgot that it is actually going to send an email every minute to a list of emails. 😅 It's because I was unfamiliar to how the Crontab works.
The crontab is a list of commands that you want to run on a regular schedule, and also the name of the command used to manage that list. Crontab stands for “cron table, ” because it uses the job scheduler cron to execute tasks; cron itself is named after “chronos, ” the Greek word for time.cron is the system process which will automatically perform tasks for you according to a set schedule. The schedule is called the crontab, which is also the name of the program used to edit that schedule. - GeeksForGeeks