Anacron is a computer program written by Sean Perry for the Unix operating system. Anacron performs the periodic command scheduling function traditionally done by cron. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly, and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that don t run 24 hours a day.

=Anacron advantages=

Most Unix systems are set up to run housekeeping chores such as log-rotation, unused files deletion, indexing local files for the search engine, etc. With cron these tasks are, often, scheduled to be executed overnight or another low-usage time to avoid straining the system. If the system is turned off at the time a given task should have been run, it will not be executed for that iteration.

On the contrary, Anacron will make sure that these commands are run at the specified intervals as closely as machine-uptime permits.

=Anacron drawbacks=

*Anacron does not allow user to schedule tasks. *Only the system administrator can configure anacron.

=See also=

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