Man page - anacrontab(5)

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Package: anacron
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Manual

ANACRONTAB (5) File Formats Manual ANACRONTAB (5)

NAME

/etc/anacrontab — monotonic jobs

DESCRIPTION

The file /etc/anacrontab follows the rules previously set by anacron(8) .

Lines starting with ‘ # ’ are comments.

Environment variables can be set using variable = value alone on a line.

The special RANDOM_DELAY (in minutes) environment variable is translated to RandomizedDelaySec= .

The special START_HOURS_RANGE (in hours) environment variable is translated to the hour component of OnCalendar= . anacron expects a range in the format start - end , but systemd-crontab-generator only uses start .

The other lines are job-descriptions in the white-space-separated format

period delay job-identifier command

where

period

is a number of days to wait between each job execution, or one of the special values @reboot , @minutely , @hourly , @midnight , @daily , @weekly , @monthly , @quarterly , @semi-annually , @yearly .

delay

is the number of extra minutes to wait before starting job, translated to OnBootSec= ,

job-identifier

is a single word used by systemd-crontab-generator to construct dynamic unit names in the form cron-anacron- job-identifier - MD5 . { timer , service },

command

is the program to run by the shell.

BUGS

systemd-crontab-generator doesn’t support multiline commands.

Any period greater than 30 is rounded to the closest month.

There are subtle differences on how anacron and systemd handle persistent timers: anacron will run a weekly job at most once a week, with a guaranteed minimum delay of 6 days between runs, whereas systemd will try to run it every monday at midnight, or at system boot. In the most extreme case, if a system was booted on sunday, weekly jobs will run that day and the again the next (mon)day.

There is no difference for the daily job.

NOTES

Real anacron only accepts @monthly and @yearly as period ; all others listed above are systemd.cron (7)’s extensions.

Unlike crontab (5), every anacrontab (5) job is persistent by default.

DIAGNOSTICS

After editing /etc/anacrontab , you can run journalctl -n and systemctl list-timers to see if the timers have well been updated.

SEE ALSO

systemd.timer (5), systemd-crontab-generator (8) systemd-cron 2.5.1-2 2023-08-19 ANACRONTAB (5)