The usage of cron is pretty obvious: Repetitive automation. I have found batch processing to really be helpful when you have a job to run repetitively--say, a hardware information gathering script, for example. I have used at extensively to rerun cronjobs that may have had a glitch or (as I mentioned earlier) simply to keep my terminal freed up. If performance is not an issue and you wish to keep the terminal free, just put the job(s) in the background.

With a little time and practice, using simple job control and batch processing can provide more productive time on your system.

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