Re: Anacron vs. cron.

[Ralph Katz <ralph.katz@rcn.com>]

On 05/01/04 13:20, R. Clayton wrote:
> I've discovered that cron.daily isn't being run (the locate database is 8 days
> old (I ran updatedb manually at one point), /usr/lib/man-cb/mandb hasn't been
> updated since 15 August 2003, and so on).  The command for daily in
> /etc/crontab is
>
>   test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily
>
> which, to my eyes, checks for /usr/sbin/anacron and, if it exists (which it
> does), does nothing; it's only when /usr/sbin/anacron doesn't exist that
> /etc/cron.daily runs.  Because I can't figure out how anacron gets run (there's
> no crontab entry I can find), this strikes me as wrong, but maybe I just don't
> understand. 
>
> Does anybody know what the story is here and, more importantly, how I can get
> daily cron jobs back (as well as weekly and monthly jobs, because their
> commands are of the same form)?  Of course, I could just uninstall anacron (or
> rewrite crontab), but is that recommended?  If not, what is?

man anacron  does a good job describing the functions.  /etc/anacrontab 
contains the default config.

Being new to linux, I had to apt-get install anacron after weeks of 
attempting to find a better way of allowing cron to do its work; I was 
manually editing /etc/crontab each day when I booted up.  My linux gurus 
didn't know what to do with me because they ran their boxes all the time.

apt-get install anacron  automatically set up everything.  I didn't have 
to touch a thing.  Just read the docs first.  I was very surprised to 
see anacron running the scripts automatically 5 minutes after I 
installed it, but that's exactly what was supposed to happen.

Regards,
Ralph