The cron entry that outlived three rewrites of what it called

A crontab line from 2019 calling a script that had been rewritten twice and moved once, still working because of a symlink nobody remembered.

0 3 * * *  /usr/local/bin/nightly-sync

$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/nightly-sync
  -> /srv/app/current/bin/sync.sh

$ cat /srv/app/current/bin/sync.sh
  #!/bin/sh
  exec php /srv/app/current/artisan supplier:sync "$@"

# three layers, two of them doing nothing, and the
# artisan command has had a --since flag since 2022 that
# nothing passes.

Every layer was added for a reason that no longer applies, and the whole chain works, which is why it survived. The --since flag is the actual finding: the sync had been doing a full pass every night for three years because the entry point predates the incremental option.