Re: daily cron jobs: setting time of day, how?

From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 11/08/05

  • Next message: Amnon Feiner: "Re: linux newbie with a few ?s" 
    Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:30:56 -0600

    In the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.suse, in article
    <dklcia$5jv$1@news4.zwoll1.ov.home.nl>, R.F. Pels wrote:

    >That's not it, houghi. What he means is that he wants to set the time at
    >which the jobs in /etc/cron.daily are run. I've been looking for that too,
    >and the only thing that seems to have anything to do with it
    >is /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily...

    Which cron daemon are you running? There are three in common use:

    Vixie cron - this runs jobs at the scheduled hour.
    anacron - runs jobs within a period
    fcron - an improvement on both

    Vixie and fcron are for computers that are running 24 hours a day, seven
    days a week. This is the classic UNIX style daemon, and Vixie cron or
    a look-alike is run on most UNIX style systems. Slackware Linux uses a
    similar daemon called Dillon cron.

    anacron and fcron are for computers that are NOT running 24/7. These
    daemons look at the crontab and see that the job has been run within
    the time interval required. Jobs scheduled to be run daily at some time
    will be run daily, BUT NOT NECESSARILY AT A SPECIFIC TIME. Jobs that
    need to be run on a specific day (example; Sunday at 0200) will be run
    soon if they haven been run since Saturday. The concept is that the
    jobs get run regularly, even if the computer happened to be turned off
    when the job is scheduled. Often, this means that the jobs are run
    shortly after booting the computer.

    'fcron' is include in both descriptions here because it can be run in
    both modes. The fact that you have a 'lastrun' directory in the cron
    spool suggests that you are running anacron, or fcron in the anacron
    emulation mode, rather than the "standard" cron daemon.

            Old guy

  • Next message: Amnon Feiner: "Re: linux newbie with a few ?s"

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