$ man cron-jobs

Cron Jobs

Scheduled tasks that run automatically at specific times.

by Shawn Tenam

You don't manually run the tracker every night. A cron job does it. Cron is how you automate recurring work. Backups, deploys, reports, data syncs. Set it once, forget it.

Cron syntax is cryptic but powerful. 0 20 * * * means "run at 8 PM every day". You define the schedule and the command. The system handles execution.