This is a development cron daemon. It's intended as a debugging tool when developing anything cron based where it would be difficult to use normal cron or when cron runs must be modified for the dev environment.
For example, I have a django project that uses cron to run periodic tasks. The crontab is in the source tree so it can be managed and deployed with the code. While doing dev work, I need to run the cron tasks locally and modify the path of the commands. The crontab looks something like:
# devcron delete_str /usr/local/bin/
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/update-stats.py && \
/usr/local/bin/publish-stats.py
That works normally on the production server and when I'm working, I run:
devcron.py my-crontab
and it will run update-stats.py in the working directory (my development tree) once a minute.
You can install with:
pip install devcron