anacrontab(5)

1ANACRONTAB(5)                Anacron Users' Manual               ANACRONTAB(5)
2
3
4

NAME

6       /etc/anacrontab - configuration file for anacron
7

DESCRIPTION

9       The  file  /etc/anacrontab describes the jobs controlled by anacron(8).
10       Its lines can be of three kinds:   job-description  lines,  environment
11       assignments, or empty lines.
12
13       Job-description lines are of one of these two forms:
14
15          period  delay  job-identifier  command
16
17          @period_name delay job-identify command
18
19       The  period  is  specified  in  days, the delay in minutes. If the RAN‐
20       DOM_DELAY environment variable is set, then a random  value  between  0
21       and  RANDOM_DELAY  minutes  will  be added to the start up delay of the
22       jobs.  For example a RANDOM_DELAY set to 12 would therefore  add,  ran‐
23       domly,  between  0  and 12 minutes to the user defined delay.  The job-
24       identifier can contain any non-blank character, except slashes.  It  is
25       used  to  identify the job in Anacron messages, and as the name for the
26       job's timestamp file.  The command can be any shell command. The fields
27       can  be  seperated by blank spaces or tabs.  The period_name can be set
28       to daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or annualy. This will ensure jobs are
29       run  once  a  week,  month or year no matter the number of days in this
30       period.
31
32       Environment assignment lines are of the form:
33
34          VAR = VALUE
35
36       Spaces around VAR are removed.  No  spaces  around  VALUE  are  allowed
37       (unless  you  want them to be part of the value).  The assignment takes
38       effect from the next line to the end  of  the  file,  or  to  the  next
39       assignment    of   the   same   variable.   The   enviroment   variable
40       START_HOURS_RANGE sets the time frame, when the job could started.
41
42       Empty lines are either blank lines, line containing  white-space  only,
43       or  lines  with  white-space followed by a '#' followed by an arbitrary
44       comment.
45
46       You can continue a line onto the next line by ending it with a '\'.
47
48       In case there is need for having anacron off, then it can  be  done  by
49       adding  cron job 0anacron into /etc/cron.hourly/jobs.deny which is part
50       of crontabs(4).
51

EXAMPLE

53       This example shows how to set up the behaviour similar to previous set‐
54       ting  in  /etc/crontab  which  will start all regular jobs only between
55       6:00 and 8:00. There is added RANDOM_DELAY which will be  maximally  30
56       minutes.  Jobs  will  be  running in queue. After one finish, then next
57       will start.
58
59       # environment variables
60       SHELL=/bin/sh
61       PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
62       MAILTO=root
63       RANDOM_DELAY=30
64       # Anacron jobs will start between 6 and 8 o'clock.
65       START_HOURS_RANGE=6-8
66       # delay will be 5 minutes + RANDOM_DELAY for cron.daily
67       1         5    cron.daily          nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily
68       7         0    cron.weekly         nice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
69       @monthly  0    cron.monthly        nice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
70

AUTHOR

77       Itai Tzur <itzur@actcom.co.il>
78
79       Currently   maintained   by   Pascal   Hakim   <pasc@(debian.org|redel‐
80       lipse.net)>.
81
82       For Fedora maintained by Marcela Mašláňová <mmaslano@redhat.com>.
83
84
85
86Marcela Mašláňová                 2009-08-17                     ANACRONTAB(5)

NAME

DESCRIPTION

EXAMPLE

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR