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-job-identifier-root-0.{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

       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)

systemd-cron 2.3.2-1build1                         2023-08-19                                      ANACRONTAB(5)