anacron

[Toby Kelsey]

I've noticed that for the last four months, monthly jobs get run on the 7th or
8th day of the month.

May  7 13:52:23 localhost anacron[8332]: Job `cron.monthly' started

On investigation it seems that anacron has a broken design and can't run things
based on specific date/times.  The way it updates timestamps also means start
times inevitably drift.

The only way of changing the start time appears to be the very hackish and
undocumented method of changing the mtime of files in /var/spool/anacron/

Is there a cron replacement available which copes with daily reboots but runs
commands asap after their specified time?

Toby