It isn’t always necessary to run Cron as a service to schedule Cygwin scripts and programs. As an alternative to using cron, you can run cygwin scripts & programs using Windows Scheduled Tasks.

From the Scheduled Tasks Window, right-click on an empty space and select ‘new task’. Enter the path to Cygwin, -l, -c, and then the full command surrounded by quotes in the RUN field. e.g.

c:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe -l -c "/full/path/to/command/plus-command >> /full/path/to/a/logfile 2>&1"

Then, in the START IN field enter:

c:\cygwin64\bin

Add a description and give your task a meaningful name so that when you come back to it in a year you know what it’s for and you’re done!

Breaking this down:

• -l :Run as if logged on at a shell
• -c :Run this command
• >> logfile :Put any output into a text file for troubleshooting
• 2>&1 :Redirect stderr to stdout (i.e. your logfile – since you’ve already redirected stdout to /full/path/to/a/logfile)

Quick and easy!