Anacron schedule

[Judith Elaine Bush <debian@grey-cat.com>]

I've edited /etc/crontab to change the time (ana)cron runs its daily,
weekly, and monthly scripts. They still seem to run after 7 am and not
at 5:25. The system has been rebooted since the crontab change (not my
fault!), so any and all daemons have been restrted since the change.

I am a little confused about the structure of the crontab command that
refers to the daily, weekly, and monthly cron schedules. Since anacron
is installed on my system, 'test -e /usr/sbin/anacron' returns
0. Thus, since the second command only runs IFF the first command
returns a non-zero status, it seems that these crontab entries don't
trigger anacron or the run-parts. (And then the
/etc/cron[daily|monthly|weekly] all have 0anacron scripts that seem to
run run-parts on the self directory.

Between my change making no difference and closely examining the
crontab entries, I am now left puzzled where anacron is scheduled to
run when the system is up for over 24 hours.

Any suggestions on what i may be missing in scheduling the run time
for anacron?

Thanks in advance,

judith

>From /etc/crontab:

# m h dom mon dow user  command
25 5    * * *   root    test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
27 5    * * 7   root    test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly
29 5    1 * *   root    test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly
#


zmore /usr/share/doc/anacron/README.gz

"   In addition to running Anacron from the boot-scripts, it is also
recommended to schedule it as a daily cron-job (usually at an early
morning hour), so that if the machine is kept running for a night,
jobs for the next day will still be executed."



more /usr/share/doc/anacron/README.Debian

"To avoid cron and anacron running the same job, place a line like:

test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts

in your crontab.  This will check if anacron exists and if not, it will let
cron do its thing.  The advantage is that if you later remove anacron, this
will still work."



< 145 10:11am greycat:/> /usr/sbin/anacron -V
Anacron 2.1
Copyright (C) 1998  Itai Tzur <itzur@actcom.co.il>
Copyright (C) 1999  Sean 'Shaleh' Perry <shaleh@debian.org>

Mail comments, suggestions and bug reports to <shaleh@debian.org>.