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-anacron-job-identifier-MD5.{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

     Real anacron only accepts @monthly and @yearly as period; all others listed above are
     systemd.cron(7)'s extensions.

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)