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Comment by markandrewj | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if your comment is accurate or not, but systemd timers have existed for a while now, and provide some flexibility cron doesn't.

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They had better provide flexibility for all the complexity and tedium they introduce. It takes creating two new config files of about 10 lines each and a long system command to set up the simplest possible systemd timer.

Yep, I wanted to create a systemd timer to run my nightly backups.

I was pretty shocked that I needed to have three files. My backup script, a systemd service to call the backup script, and a systemd timer to call my systemd service that calls my backup script.

It took A LOT of fiddling and reading the Arch wiki before I had everything working as I wanted it to.

I have also set up timers in Arch, and it wasn't that bad...

Really? How did you do it then?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers

You can also find more documentation on the official systemd website, or Gentoo, CoreOS, and RedHat's website.

As an example: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd#Timer_services

I'm confused, unless I'm missing something, both of those pages seem to describe exactly the process mbreedlove described:

    1) create systemd service to call your script
    2) create a systemd timer to call that service

What did you do differently?

I didn't say I did anything different, I said it wasn't that difficult.

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