How does scheduling work?

Question

How do programs designed for scheduling (e.g. Task Scheduler in Windows, cron in Unix systems) know that it "is time" for them to run a certain scheduled command or script?

I imagine it's not something like a timed function checking the system clock every second or minute. Is there some kind of trigger being activated when a time stamp corresponding to a certain planned task is reached?

Answer 1

This probably varies between OSes. For cron, the crond manpage indicates that there's a daemon running in the background which activates itself every minute to check if there's a task that needs to be run.

Windows also has a service that does this according to this support page, though I have no idea of its granularity. Its likely it works similarly.