I accidentally sent this only to Peter... here it is for the record: On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Wed 03 Mar 04, 12:04 PM, Jeff Newmiller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: [...] > > If cron and anacron are both installed in Debian, /etc/crontab is > > configured to skip daily/weekly/monthly processing, because > > /etc/anacrontab specifies those as well, and if your machine is regularly > > shut down, then anacron is better suited to handle it. What burns me is > > that one _or_ the other should be installed... someone must have decided > > that cron was good for some things and anacron good for others and wanted > > both installed... leaving you erroneously thinking you were having some > > effect by editing the daily entry in /etc/crontab. > > > > In their defense, though, the solution _is_ right there in the line you > > edited... > > i'm still don't understand -- how does anacron know when, that is the > *time* (not the date) to run? This puzzled me too.. thanks to Steve Wormley for pointing me to the solution: Vixie cron processes three sets of crontabs... /etc/crontab, individual crontabs (/var/spool/cron/username), and any crontabs found in /etc/cron.d/. anacron is invoked periodically by a line in /etc/cron.d/anacron, and uses the period specs in /etc/anacrontab and last-executed timestamps in /var/spool/anacron/* to determine whether enough time has passed that it should invoke the daily/weekly/monthly processing. > i see references to the last date job X ran in /etc/anacrontab. You do? Those should be in /var/spool/anacron/* ... for example: --- /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily/ --- 20040303 -------------------------------------- and /etc/anacrontab should have time interval specifications: --- /etc/anacrontab --- # /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron # See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details. SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin # These replace cron's entries 1 5 cron.daily nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily 7 10 cron.weekly nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly 30 15 cron.monthly nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly ----------------------- as documented in man anacrontab. > i understand that anacron prolly looks at these dates when it first > runs. Every time it runs. > i don't see any mention of anacron in /etc/crontab. how does it run > after bootup? um, /etc/init.d/anacron? I realize now that anacron cannot run separately from cron... but this is still an absurdly complicated system just to get things to run periodically. Also, why retain /etc/crontab at all if /etc/cron.d is going to be used? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Newmiller The ..... ..... Go Live... DCN:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Basics: ##.#. ##.#. Live Go... Live: OO#.. Dead: OO#.. Playing Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries O.O#. #.O#. with /Software/Embedded Controllers) .OO#. .OO#. rocks...2k --------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech