[vox-tech] cron - not at a different time

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Wed 03 Mar 04, 11:28 AM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil@dcn.davis.ca.us> said:
> On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Ken Herron wrote:
> 
> > --On Wednesday, March 03, 2004 10:11:10 -0800 Peter Jay Salzman 
> > <p@dirac.org> wrote:
> > 
> > >> > 25 4 * * * root test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report
> > >> /etc/cron.daily
> > >>
> > >> That line will only launch "run-parts" if /usr/sbin/anacron doesn't
> > >> exist. Does /usr/sbin/anacron exist?
> > >
> > > ken,
> > >
> > > yeah, it does exist.   daily definitely runs.  it just runs at a time i
> > > wasn't expecting.
> > 
> > My point was that if /usr/sbin/anacron exists, then the crontab line 
> > above will not run cron.daily. You say that /usr/sbin/anacron exists, so 
> > cron.daily is not being launched as a result of the above crontab line. 
> > That means something else is running it. Something like anacron, for 
> > example.
> 
> This list is great.  This explains a longstanding puzzle (to me) of how
> (and to some extent why) both cron and anacron are installed on my debian
> box.
> 
> Now that I see how it works, I am not too impressed with this kludge,
> though... this is a deceptively obtuse configuration duplication between
> these two packages.

ok, maybe i'm slow, but i don't understand why that line will only
launch if /usr/sbin/anacron doesn't exist.

/etc/init.d/cron gets run upon startup.  the only test i see is:

   test -f /usr/sbin/cron || exit 0

it doesn't look look for /usr/sbin/anacron.  what am i missing?

pete

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