Odd locate behavior

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Colin Law wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>>         "For  each  job,  Anacron  checks  whether  this job has
>>           been executed in the last n days, where n is the period
>>           specified for that job.  If not, Anacron runs the job's
>>           shell command, after waiting for the number of minutes
>>           specified as the delay parameter."
>>
>> I could be interpreting that incorrectly, but here's my take on it:
>>
>> If anacron runs today, it checks if it has been more than 1 day
>> since any daily cron jobs were supposed to fire. Right?
>
>I would interpret it to mean it checks if it is more than 1 day since
>it has actually been executed, not since it was supposed to be
>executed.

My interpretation is based on my belief that its reference to "this
job" in the "whether this job has been executed in the last n days"
part of the man page is referring to today's job and not yesterday's
job and since it hasn't yet been n days since today's job, it won't
be executed until tomorrow when it will have been 1 day since today's
job.

>It will never be more than one day since the cron job was supposed to
>run, as it is supposed to run every day.

We agree here, but my interpretation is that it will always be one
full day.

Once again, I know I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be proven
wrong. I'm just going off of observed behavior and my reading of the
man page. I've got the kind of brain that takes words literally and I
realize they're not always intended that way.

That said, I'm not cron-savvy. Is there a very simple test that can be
done, like making a cron job that puts a text file on the desktop at
three in the morning when the computer is certain to be off? If
someone would give me the steps, I'd be happy to try it tonight and
report back tomorrow and possibly the next day if nothing happens
tomorrow, which is how I suspect it may turn out.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.