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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 (in minutes) environment variable is translated to .

The special (in hours) environment variable is translated to the hour component of . 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 , , , , , , @monthly, , , .
delay
is the number of extra minutes to wait before starting job, translated to ,
job-identifier
is a single word used by systemd-crontab-generator to construct dynamic unit names in the form job-identifier0{, },
command
is the program to run by the shell.

BUGS

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

Any period greater than 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)

2023-08-19 systemd-cron 2.3.0-1~bpo12+1