Re: Anacron vs. cron.
On Saturday 01 May 2004 6:13 pm, R. Clayton wrote:
> I've discovered that cron.daily isn't being run (the locate database
> is 8 days old (I ran updatedb manually at one point),
> /usr/lib/man-cb/mandb hasn't been updated since 15 August 2003, and
> so on). The command for daily in /etc/crontab is
> test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily
> which, to my eyes, checks for /usr/sbin/anacron and, if it exists
> (which it does), does nothing; it's only when /usr/sbin/anacron
> doesn't exist that /etc/cron.daily runs. Because I can't figure out
> how anacron gets run (there's no crontab entry I can find), this
> strikes me as wrong, but maybe I just don't understand.
> Does anybody know what the story is here and, more importantly, how I
> can get daily cron jobs back (as well as weekly and monthly jobs,
> because their commands are of the same form)? Of course, I could
> just uninstall anacron (or rewrite crontab), but is that recommended?
> If not, what is?
Anacron is recommended if your computer is not left on more or less
continuously. I'm not sure why it doesn't just supercede cron, or why
it isn't pulled in with it or anything,  but I strongly advise you
to install anacron.
Actually I suppose there is a reason, because it would be
superfluous for server runners and the like, but they would be more
likely to know to remove the anacron package than the new user would be
to install it. Is this a bug, then, or am I missing something?