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

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¶

anacron only supports @monthly.

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)