Talk:anacron

Anacron drawbacks

• Anacron does not allow user to schedule tasks. - TODO fixed in cronie's anacron and debian's, not sure when
• Only the system administrator can configure anacron.

As this is redundant, I'm removing the top example (which is bad in itself, it should read "Anacron does not allow a non-superuser to schedule tasks." or something of that sort). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by BillG (talk • contribs) 13:56, August 7, 2006 (UTC)

I have expanded the drawbacks section. Feedback is appreciated. Ariel. 12:04, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Why is there a drawbacks section that does nothing but compare Anacron to cron? It is outright stated that it is not meant as a replacement for cron. Dustin Howett (talk) 03:28, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

In fact, it's an extension of cron. The original design of cron assumes that machines will be active when events are scheduled to occur; anacron extends cron so that it's useful on machines that are switched off overnight and on weekends, for instance. It also strikes me as odd to talk about "drawbacks," when we're really talking about limitations, which are intentional design choices in keeping with general Unix/Linux conventions. It's not a "drawback" that non-administrative users can't execute administrative tasks, anymore than it's a "drawback" that automobiles don't have steering wheels, gas pedals, and brake pedals in the back seat.--FoolishOwl (talk) 19:20, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

This is odd. I have anacron on my system, and I can still run crontab -e. 82.69.29.161 (talk) 09:19, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Definition

Can we get a definition on where the name "anacron" comes from/what it means? Salvar (talk) 21:57, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

On my box, /etc/init/anacron.conf has the description: "anac(h)ronistic cron". Small script to find it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# loop over every filename containing 'anacron' (found by `locate`)
while IFS= read -r file; do

    # regular expression
    re="anac\(?h\)?ronis(m|tic)"

    # search for the regexp using grep: print line numbers and filename,
    # ignore case, and use extended regular expressions
    #
    # if filename ending in .gz, use zgrep
    if [[ $file = *.gz ]]; then
        zgrep -niHE "$re" "$file"
    # otherwise, just regular grep
    else
        grep -niHE "$re" "$file"
    fi

done < <(locate 'anacron')

History

I'd like to see a history of anacron. In particular, I would guess that it was developed when UNIX began to be used more as a desktop/home OS instead of just as a server OS. (Servers are on 24x7 so something like anacron isn't really needed.) So I'd like to see some verification of that. Also, WHEN was it developed? I can't find the answers to these questions, or I would add them to the article -- but I hope someone does. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.165.132.252 (talk) 05:02, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Unmaintained but a dependency of cronie?

The Sourceforge page hasn't been uploaded since 2009, but it is pulled in (and apparently modified https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/tree/master/anacron) by the cronie project at https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/tree/master/anacron. II | (t - c) 23:21, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Updated the article a bit to reflect this. II | (t - c) 23:52, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

wrong date?

v2.3 seems to have already been published on sourceforge in 2000 instead of 2009.--Reseletti (talk) 09:27, 30 August 2019 (UTC)