Why did I write this?
I wrote ICron for Windows NT before Windows 2000's Scheduled Task service was available. At the time, the only scheduling options were using "At", which is fine for very simple tasks, but hopeless for doing anything like running a program every minute, and third party programs like WinCron, which does essentially the right thing, but doesn't run as a service so a user must be logged in for it to work (which makes it useless for running on a server).
ICron solves these problems by running as a Windows service, and uses the standard Unix crontab form so it's easy to specify when things will run down to a granularity of a minute.
How to use it
Install it as a service with:
icronservice /install /silent
Uninstall the service with:
icronservice /uninstall /silent
While the service is installed, start it with:
net start icron /filename=<filename>
and stop it with
net stop icron
If no /crontab argument is given, $WINDOWS_DIR%/crontab is used as the crontab file
The crontab is only read when the service starts - to reread it, stop and restart the service.
The syntax of the crontab file is identical to the Unix crontab; a series of lines specifying a command and the times to execute them at. For example:
10,12-13 4,5 * * * c:\execute.bat
will run "c:\execute.bat" at 4:10, 4:12, 4:13, 5:10, 5:12, and 5:13 every day.
The fields are minutes, hours, weekday, day of month, month, and "string to execute". * signifies all.
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