anacron

[Derek Broughton]

Toby Kelsey wrote:

> David Hart wrote:
> 
>  > What's broken about it?  It's designed to work that way with a minimum
>> time granularity of one day.  Times will only drift if you shut your box
>> off for more than about a day.
> 
> Ah, I thought it was looking at the time of day, not just the date, and so
> would
> slowly drift.  It is broken in the sense that it is advertised as a
> replacement for cron but doesn't actually stick to a given time of day or
> day of month,
> which to me violates expected behavour.  I'm just used to cron semantics.

Anacron exists to ensure that scheduled jobs run _sometime_.  So it runs at
boot _and then stops_.  It also runs at set times of day (specified by
cron) to execute the cron.*ly schedules.  If you want something to _always_
run at an exact time, you put it in a crontab, if you want something to
always get run, even if your system isn't up when scheduled, you use
anacron.

"Description: a cron-like program that doesn't go by time" seems to be
pretty clear that you _can't_ expect it to run at set times.  It's _not_
advertised as a replacement for cron, either.  It's a supplement to cron -
mostly for those of us with laptops, or desktop machines we shut down when
not in use.

-- 
derek