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    "Cron is guaranteed to be in any Unix-like system. That is not going to change." – I would strongly debate this. While historically cron has often been included in the base setup of Unix installations, on most systems today it's simply an arbitrary optional software package among others. In fact, there are several popular cron alternatives around (e.g. anacron, fcron, jobber) which may be preferable to cron. cron's functionality is not essential for a system's operation the way systemd or init is, so if you're concerned about current and future portability, I'd rather not place my bets on it. Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 13:52
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    @Guido I just meant that it is guaranteed to be available for installation. I didn't men to say it was guaranteed to be installed on any given Unix-like system, though this is probably the case most of the time. On Debian, at least, cron has priority important, though it doesn't try very hard to stop me from removing it. The only thing my system has that actually depends on it is munin, which is a little surprising. Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 14:39
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    That's quite a list of things you want in an answer. I think maybe you should spend some time learning the tools yourself and see if you can formulate those answers on your own, and if you have specific things you don't understand, ask them here. Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 14:56
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    @larsks It's intended as a reference. In case that wasn't already clear. Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 15:09
  • Regarding “one side-by-side comparison of a cron script vs a systemd timers script”: could you hand out at least one use case? Commented Jan 26, 2022 at 4:00