anacron

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 19:37, Toby Kelsey wrote:
> |^ `/ () () | ( (-) | wrote:
> |
> > On 5/9/06, *Toby Kelsey* <toby_kelsey at ntlworld.com
> > <mailto:toby_kelsey at ntlworld.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     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.
> >
> >
> > What? rtfm
>
> Yes, the man page is accurate.  But if I put a script in
> /etc/cron.monthly I expect it to be run on the first of the month,
> or as specified in the crontab. That's what I mean by "violating
> expected behaviour".
>
> If it doesn't behave like cron, it shouldn't use cron data files.

It doesn't use /etc/crontab. cron ran at exactly the time 
your /etc/crontab said it should so nothing is being violated.

The job run by cron is anacron, which looks in /etc/cron.* to see if 
any scheduled crons were missed and if so, executes them.

Every distro I've used for the past several years does this, it's 
standard behaviour. If you don't like it, remove the anacron calls 
from your crontab

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five