With Python there’s always a lot of libraries and options for solving any particular problem and running scheduled or recurring jobs is no exception. Whether you want to run simple deferred task, bunch of scheduled jobs or manage cron tabs, there’s specialized library for that in Python. So, in this article I will give you an overview of all the options available to help you choose the right tool for the task at hand, as well as their use cases, including intro and basic examples to get you started quickly!
The Builtin Solution
Before exploring any external libraries, let’s first check what we have in Pythons standard library. Most of the time, Python standard library will contain solution to whatever problem you might have and if the problem is running deferred jobs like with Linux at command, then grabbing sched module might be the way to go.
sched is a very simple module, which can be used to schedule one-off tasks for some specified time - so, it's important to realise, that this is not recurring job (like cron job). It works on all platforms, which might seem obvious, but will not necessarily be the case with all the libraries shown later.
One of the use cases for such deferred task can be scheduled shutdown or if you are’re working with network connections or firewall you can create one-time job to revert changes in case you mess up and lock yourself out of the system.