Mystified by crontab/anacrontab

[Robert Nichols]

On 03/01/2010 10:55 AM, Tom Horsley wrote:
> 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:

The best way to disable anacron is to edit /etc/anacrontab and
change the START_HOURS_RANGE to something impossible.  I use
"START_HOURS_RANGE=25-25" on my laptop, where I prefer to run
the various daily, weekly, and monthly jobs manually,
generally just before shutting the machine down at the end of
the day.  The /etc/anacrontab file is marked as a configuration
file in the RPM, so it is preserved during updates.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.