I know there is a burning utility in the graphical interface, but I'd like to setup a cron job that will burn a list of files to a CDRW at regular intervals.

I have never used my CD burner on this machine before, so I'm not even sure if it's going to work. It's an HP CdWriter 9500 that's connected with an IDE cable. I've been hearing that maybe I need to have it plugged into a SCSI card?

If somebody can get me headed in the right direction, that would be excellent. I'm not necessarily interested in writing the cron job immediately. If somebody can just walk me thru the command line stuff that I need, I can figure out the cron later.

Thanks in advance!

well no it does not need to be connected to a scsi card, you will just need scsi-emulation...
anyways in the terminal type:
cdrecord --scanbus
and you will get your device number in the first column in the output...
for instance mine says:
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) 'AOPEN ' 'CD-RW CRW2040 ' '1.22' Removable CD-ROM
so by that i see it is 0,0,0
after you find out that info you can then burn from command line
an example of a command i would use is:
cdrecord --dev=0,0,0 -speed 20 -eject nameofFile

so to break it down you will specify your device with --dev=
then you can specify the speed at which you want to burn at, and then -eject will eject the cd after burn completes, and then lastly you give the name of the file...
typing :
cdrecord -help
will give you a big list of available commands..

I did that, but there is an error. It says something to the effect of...

cdrecord: Warning: using inofficial libscg transport code version (schily - Red Hat-scsi-linux-sg.c-1.75-RH '@(#)scsi-linux-sg.c

What could this mean? It never said anything like what you described. I take this to mean the drive isn't being recognized. What can I do to correct this?