Start, Stop and Restart Crond Daemon in Linux

Cron jobs in Linux and its variants such as FreeBSD or CentOS which commonly used on web hosts due to popularity of cPanel web server control panel system, is important time based scheduled tasks and commands that perform various functions such as log rotation, updates checking, system maintenance, file system cleaning, backup, service restart and etc.

Cron jobs are managed by a daemon named crond. When cron schedules are added, deleted or modified by crontab, any changes are enacted by the crond daemon. Crond daemon runs constantly in the background and checks once a minute to see if any of the scheduled jobs need to be executed. If any, crond will execute the commands. If crond process is not running, no cron jobs will be executed.

Thus, it’s important to ensure that crond daemon is running and not hanged in the system. To manage crond daemon in Linux, we can make use of “service” command.

To check the status of crond daemon:

service crond status

To stop and terminate crond process:

service crond stop

To start and run crond daemon:

service crond start

To restart crond service:

service crond restart

2 Responses to “Start, Stop and Restart Crond Daemon in Linux”

  1. SivaramaKrishnan
    July 3rd, 2008 13:04
    2

    I have cron daemon running and I added an entry using crontab -e command. When the exact time reached, the script that is specified is the crontab did not get executed.

    But, if I restart the cron daemon (using the command /etc/init.d/crond restart) after adding the cron entry (using crontab -e command), then the script gets executed at the specified time.

    When I looked at the man page of crond, they have clearly mentioned that, it is not required to restart cron daemon everytime the cron entries are updated. Am not sure whether I need to start the cron daemon with specific parameters so that it does not need to be restarted every time I update the cron entries.

    Any help is appreciated.
    Thanks & Regards
    - Siva

  2. cPanel Update (upcp) Is Already Running Problem » My Digital Life
    December 6th, 2007 00:05
    1

    [...] killing crond process, you will have to start crond daemon again, else all cron jobs won’t run. Get help or contribute tips or tricks at My Digital Life [...]

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