Many times, the items we need to schedule to run automatically, such as virus and malware scans, have a built in scheduler which allow you to create an event without having to use the task scheduler in your OS. This tip serves as just a simple reference to some resources which show you how to create a scheduled task in all the major OS’s for when you actually need to schedule a task yourself.

How to create a scheduled task in:

• Windows XP (this information is virtually the same in Windows 2000)
• Windows Vista
• Mac OS X Panther
• Linux (using crontab)

In addition, I found this comparison of scheduled task between Windows XP and OS X to be interesting.

Happy automating.

If you run a lot of Windows scheduled tasks, particularly on a server, it is very worthwhile to have a local account dedicated to nothing but this. The reasons being:

• If you run the task as a normal user account and that user happens to be logged when the task starts, the process runs in the current user’s session. If the user logs out while the task is running, the task quits and doesn’t complete.
• Changing an account password doesn’t effect the scheduled task account at all.

When you create a scheduled task account, it is best to assign it a long random password since you will not be using it hardly and to lock down the permissions as much as possible. For example, you would probably want to eliminate remote login for this account or just give it “Backup Operator” permissions.