The exact sequence in which jobs are executed will depend on the implementation of your systems' crond. What is your OS? If you have cronjob in a crontab: Job 1 Job 2 Job 3 In Debian Job1 will start, without waiting to finish Job 2, etc. <br> In Debian and Ubuntu derivatives it is top-bottom <br> In FreeBSD it is bottom-top <br> If your cronjobs are in /etc/cron.hourly(or daily/monthly/weekly) - then the script that runs them does it sequently, not in paralel. (a script loops though them and waits for each to finish) <br> **EDIT** Add two different cronjobs (here I assume you have syslog configured) <br> `* * * * * ls /etc/` <br> `* * * * * echo "whatever` <br> ``tail -f /var/log/cron``