How do I get a Cron like scheduler in Python?

You could just use normal Python argument passing syntax to specify your crontab. For example, suppose we define an Event class as below:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import time

# Some utility classes / functions first
class AllMatch(set):
    """Universal set - match everything"""
    def __contains__(self, item): return True

allMatch = AllMatch()

def conv_to_set(obj):  # Allow single integer to be provided
    if isinstance(obj, (int,long)):
        return set([obj])  # Single item
    if not isinstance(obj, set):
        obj = set(obj)
    return obj

# The actual Event class
class Event(object):
    def __init__(self, action, min=allMatch, hour=allMatch, 
                       day=allMatch, month=allMatch, dow=allMatch, 
                       args=(), kwargs={}):
        self.mins = conv_to_set(min)
        self.hours= conv_to_set(hour)
        self.days = conv_to_set(day)
        self.months = conv_to_set(month)
        self.dow = conv_to_set(dow)
        self.action = action
        self.args = args
        self.kwargs = kwargs

    def matchtime(self, t):
        """Return True if this event should trigger at the specified datetime"""
        return ((t.minute     in self.mins) and
                (t.hour       in self.hours) and
                (t.day        in self.days) and
                (t.month      in self.months) and
                (t.weekday()  in self.dow))

    def check(self, t):
        if self.matchtime(t):
            self.action(*self.args, **self.kwargs)

(Note: Not thoroughly tested)

Then your CronTab can be specified in normal python syntax as:

c = CronTab(
  Event(perform_backup, 0, 2, dow=6 ),
  Event(purge_temps, 0, range(9,18,2), dow=range(0,5))
)

This way you get the full power of Python's argument mechanics (mixing positional and keyword args, and can use symbolic names for names of weeks and months)

The CronTab class would be defined as simply sleeping in minute increments, and calling check() on each event. (There are probably some subtleties with daylight savings time / timezones to be wary of though). Here's a quick implementation:

class CronTab(object):
    def __init__(self, *events):
        self.events = events

    def run(self):
        t=datetime(*datetime.now().timetuple()[:5])
        while 1:
            for e in self.events:
                e.check(t)

            t += timedelta(minutes=1)
            while datetime.now() < t:
                time.sleep((t - datetime.now()).seconds)

A few things to note: Python's weekdays / months are zero indexed (unlike cron), and that range excludes the last element, hence syntax like "1-5" becomes range(0,5) - ie [0,1,2,3,4]. If you prefer cron syntax, parsing it shouldn't be too difficult however.

I know there are a lot of answers, but another solution could be to go with decorators. This is an example to repeat a function everyday at a specific time. The cool think about using this way is that you only need to add the Syntactic Sugar to the function you want to schedule:

@repeatEveryDay(hour=6, minutes=30)
def sayHello(name):
    print(f"Hello {name}")

sayHello("Bob") # Now this function will be invoked every day at 6.30 a.m

And the decorator will look like:

def repeatEveryDay(hour, minutes=0, seconds=0):
    """
    Decorator that will run the decorated function everyday at that hour, minutes and seconds.
    :param hour: 0-24
    :param minutes: 0-60 (Optional)
    :param seconds: 0-60 (Optional)
    """
    def decoratorRepeat(func):

        @functools.wraps(func)
        def wrapperRepeat(*args, **kwargs):

            def getLocalTime():
                return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(time.localtime()))

            # Get the datetime of the first function call
            td = datetime.timedelta(seconds=15)
            if wrapperRepeat.nextSent == None:
                now = getLocalTime()
                wrapperRepeat.nextSent = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, hour, minutes, seconds)
                if wrapperRepeat.nextSent < now:
                    wrapperRepeat.nextSent += td

            # Waiting till next day
            while getLocalTime() < wrapperRepeat.nextSent:
                time.sleep(1)

            # Call the function
            func(*args, **kwargs)

            # Get the datetime of the next function call
            wrapperRepeat.nextSent += td
            wrapperRepeat(*args, **kwargs)

        wrapperRepeat.nextSent = None
        return wrapperRepeat

    return decoratorRepeat

I like how the pycron package solves this problem.

import pycron
import time

while True:
    if pycron.is_now('0 2 * * 0'):   # True Every Sunday at 02:00
        print('running backup')
        time.sleep(60)               # The process should take at least 60 sec
                                     # to avoid running twice in one minute
    else:
        time.sleep(15)               # Check again in 15 seconds

There isn't a "pure python" way to do this because some other process would have to launch python in order to run your solution. Every platform will have one or twenty different ways to launch processes and monitor their progress. On unix platforms, cron is the old standard. On Mac OS X there is also launchd, which combines cron-like launching with watchdog functionality that can keep your process alive if that's what you want. Once python is running, then you can use the sched module to schedule tasks.

I don't know if something like that already exists. It would be easy to write your own with time, datetime and/or calendar modules, see http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

The only concern for a python solution is that your job needs to be always running and possibly be automatically "resurrected" after a reboot, something for which you do need to rely on system dependent solutions.