User Controlled anacron

Hourly Jobs

anacron does not support running jobs at an hourly interval. But cron can be used directly to do this.

User crontab

Create or edit the your crontab like this:

$ crontab -e

and create two entries:

# run anacron to check daily/monthly/weekly
01 * * * * /usr/sbin/anacron -t /home/user/.anacron/anacrontab -S /home/user/.anacron/spool

# run hourly jobs
01 * * * * nice run-parts /home/user/.anacron/cron.hourly

(Replace "/home/user" with your home directory.)

anacron will now be launched every hour and check for pending jobs.

The two options in the anacron command are:

-S

Use this directory as the spool directory. Timestamp files are kept here.

-t

Use this anacrontab instead of the system-wide /etc/anacrontab

Of course, this only works if you create the personal anacrontab and the necessary directories.

$ mkdir ~/.anacron
$ mkdir ~/.anacron/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly}
$ mkdir ~/.anacron/spool
$ nano ~/.anacron/anacrontab

Edit the anacrontab too look like this:

~/.anacron/anacrontab
------------------------------------------------------

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/home/user/bin
HOME=/home/user
LOGNAME=user

# period  delay  job-id  command
1  5   user.cron.daily    nice run-parts /home/user/.anacron/cron.daily

7  10  user.cron.weekly   nice run-parts /home/user/.anacron/cron.weekly

@monthly  5  user.cron.monthly  nice run-parts /home/user/.anacron/cron.monthly

(Replace "user" with your username, "/home/user" with your home directory.)

Now, put (or symlink) the scripts to be executed daily/weekly/monthly into the respective directories.

$ chmod u+x the-script

#!/bin/bash
your-command