cron job and batch job????

[clinton]

What's the difference between running a job as a cron job and a batch job?

[pando]

cron job is programmed, batch job is doing loads of tasks in a go.
they are both related because normally you program batch jobs with cron and to execute them in an hour when the activity is low (early morning like 2 am to 4 am for example depending your company)
cron jobs can be batch jobs, backups, monitoring etc
batch jobs can be mass data loading, mass updating etc

[rogerF]

"cron" is usually mentioned as a Unix utility- which basically calls a script or a "one-liner" at any given time or interval listed in your crontab. I'm not sure if the actual cron program is available for NT- I just use Unix.

So ... if you have a unix box just try the man page:

%man cron

You may try:

%crontab -l

Which will list the current cronjobs for the current user.

%crontab -e

will edit the crontab. Make sure you do a:

export EDITOR=vi

so that cron knows which editor you use.

[denevge]

Another difference between a 'crontab'-job and an 'at'-job.

When you issue a job using at, the unix-environment is automatically put in the job. eg. when you have set your oracle environment, and you start a job using at, automaticly you have the right oracle settings.

When you issue a job using crontab, you have to set the environment in the script. That's why I always begin a crontab job with
. /etc/profile
. $HOME/.profile

Regards
Gert