Mystified by crontab/anacrontab

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:56:03 +0000
Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Any enlightenment gratefully received.

I don't know about enlightenment, but I find the whole anacron
thing absolutely useless and annoying. I used to be able
to get rid of it by disabling the (separate) anacron
service, or "yum erase anacron", but now that isn't
possible. Instead I have to go to alot of trouble to
transfer the anacrontab entries to crontab (fixing the
format) and eradicate everything anacron does by squashing
several files. I've got this script which runs in
a yum hook I wrote after every update to make sure
it stays squashed:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Drive a stake through anacron's heart if updates try to
# reinstall it.
#
for i in /etc/cron.d/0hourly /etc/cron.hourly/0anacron /etc/anacrontab
do
   if [ -s $i ]
   then
      cat /dev/null > $i
   fi
   rm -f $i.rpmnew
   rm -f $i.rpmsave
done

Now my cron jobs run when they are supposed to run, not at some
random unpredictable and highly inconvenient time.