ANACRONTAB(5)		     Anacron Users' Manual		 ANACRONTAB(5)



NAME
       /etc/anacrontab - configuration file for anacron

DESCRIPTION
       The  file  /etc/anacrontab describes the jobs controlled by anacron(8).
       Its lines can be of three kinds:	  job-description  lines,  environment
       assignments, or empty lines.

       Job-description lines are of one of these two forms:

	  period  delay	 job-identifier	 command

	  @period_name delay job-identify command

       The  period  is	specified  in  days, the delay in minutes. If the RAN-
       DOM_DELAY environment variable is set, then a random  value  between  0
       and  RANDOM_DELAY  minutes  will	 be added to the start up delay of the
       jobs.  For example a RANDOM_DELAY set to 12 would therefore  add,  ran-
       domly,  between	0  and 12 minutes to the user defined delay.  The job-
       identifier can contain any non-blank character, except slashes.	It  is
       used  to	 identify the job in Anacron messages, and as the name for the
       job's timestamp file.  The command can be any shell command. The fields
       can  be	seperated by blank spaces or tabs.  The period_name can be set
       to daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or annualy. This will ensure jobs are
       run  once  a  week,  month or year no matter the number of days in this
       period.

       Environment assignment lines are of the form:

	  VAR = VALUE

       Spaces around VAR are removed.  No  spaces  around  VALUE  are  allowed
       (unless	you  want them to be part of the value).  The assignment takes
       effect from the next line to the end  of	 the  file,  or	 to  the  next
       assignment    of	  the	same   variable.   The	 enviroment   variable
       START_HOURS_RANGE sets the time frame, when the job could started.

       Empty lines are either blank lines, line containing  white-space	 only,
       or  lines  with	white-space followed by a '#' followed by an arbitrary
       comment.

       You can continue a line onto the next line by ending it with a '\'.

       In case there is need for having anacron off, then it can  be  done  by
       adding  cron job 0anacron into /etc/cron.hourly/jobs.deny which is part
       of crontabs(4).

EXAMPLE
       This example shows how to set up the behaviour similar to previous set-
       ting  in	 /etc/crontab  which  will start all regular jobs only between
       6:00 and 8:00. There is added RANDOM_DELAY which will be	 maximally  30
       minutes.	 Jobs  will  be	 running in queue. After one finish, then next
       will start.

       # environment variables
       SHELL=/bin/sh
       PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
       MAILTO=root
       RANDOM_DELAY=30
       # Anacron jobs will start between 6 and 8 o'clock.
       START_HOURS_RANGE=6-8
       # delay will be 5 minutes + RANDOM_DELAY for cron.daily
       1	 5    cron.daily	  nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily
       7	 0    cron.weekly	  nice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
       @monthly	 0    cron.monthly	  nice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

SEE ALSO
       anacron(8), crontabs(4)

       The Anacron README file.

AUTHOR
       Itai Tzur <itzur@actcom.co.il>

       Currently   maintained	by   Pascal   Hakim   <pasc@(debian.org|redel-
       lipse.net)>.

       For Fedora maintained by Marcela Malaova <mmaslano@redhat.com>.



Marcela Malaova			  2009-08-17			 ANACRONTAB(5)