Question

Some cygwin commands are .exe files, so you can run them with the standard Windows Scheduler, but others don’t have an .exe extension so can’t be run from DOS (it seems like).

For example I want updatedb to run nightly.

How do I make cron work?

Answer 1

You need to also install cygrunsrv so you can set cron up as a windows service, then run cron-config.

If you want the cron jobs to send email of any output you’ll also need to install either exim or ssmtp (before running cron-config.)

See /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron-*.README for more details.

Regarding programs without a .exe extension, they are probably shell scripts of some type. If you look at the first line of the file you could see what program you need to use to run them (e.g., ‘#!/bin/sh‘), so you could perhaps execute them from the windows scheduler by calling the shell program (e.g., ‘C:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe -l /my/cygwin/path/to/prog‘.)