Cron schedule

A clock-based schedule expressed as recurring time fields, commonly used to trigger jobs at matching minutes, hours, days, or weekdays.

Cron implementations evaluate a schedule under a configured time zone and runtime. A matching time can be skipped during downtime, duplicated by overlapping workers, or behave unexpectedly around daylight-saving changes unless the platform defines misfire and concurrency policy. The schedule starts a run; it does not decide whether useful work exists.

Builder example

Cron fits periodic work such as daily aggregation or weekly maintenance. Idempotency, locking, catch-up, time zone, holiday behavior, and empty-run checks determine whether the routine behaves reliably; a schedule does not guarantee execution exactly on time.

Common confusion: A cron schedule fires on the clock; an event trigger fires when something happens, like a new file arriving. What separates them is the cause: time versus an event. A clock-based run is predictable but can wake to find no work, while an event-based run only starts when there is something to react to.