Cron is a popular tool on Unix/Linux systems that can execute periodic jobs given a schedule definition. The job schedule definitions are stored in files named cron tabs.
This class can parse cron tab files to retrieve the schedules of the jobs that are defined. It can be useful to determine when was the last time or will be the next time that a jobs will be executed. It can be useful to applications that depend on the knowledge of the scheduled jobs.
This class can parse cron tab schedules. It does not parse cron tab files themselves, but instead, can determine when a cron job should have last run, given the schedule in cron tab format (like 0 5 * * 1-4)
It can determine when a cron job should have last run, which can be used in conjunction with database logging to determine if a backup cron server should run a job or to create a complete PHP alternative to cron (maybe distributed across several servers). Updated with some example code and documentation explaining how it might be implemented.