Hello!

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 I try to learn about using anacron. And there're 3 things so far that I can't understand. Please explain!

1.) WHEN does the anacron command (tast) should be executed for the FIRST TIME?
Let's say today is Wednesday 2 p.m. (14:00) and I've just made a new weekly task for anacron. So when should I be expecting the first execution of it? In other words, what's the starting point here? Weekly, starting from...???

2.) Let's say I've got 3 commands. So this MUST be a script OR... I can stuff all three commands in ONE single anacron task? To be more specific, I want to stop the process, delete the file's content and then to re-start the same stopped process.

3.) Where should I put the commands for anacron? They say that in /etc/anacrontab, but there I see 3 default lines of commands that govern the cron (if I understand that correctly). Should I write my own commands in the same place just below those three?

A date stamp is written in /var/spool/anacron. Your command will run a week later with the start time based upon the delay. If you computer is running it will be 07:30 plus the delay time. If not running or sleeping and the date has passed it will run at boot/wake up plus the delay.

Your anacron job should be written beneath the existing jobs. I've never played with anacron much so not sure if all three can be on the same line. I would create a separate script.

Thanks for your reply!

I made a bash script and I made it by using gedit as sudo. Let's call it "script.sh". Then I made the script executable. I've already tested it. It does run, but with sudo. Inside the script I didn't put sudo. The script's attributes are:
-rwxr-xr-x
I wanna put it in /home/myname/bin/script.sh

So what about cron/anacron? Does it act as root, so it has enough privileges to run the script the way it is (as I described)?

In /etc/passwd root has /bin/bash, but in both /etc/anacrontab and /etc/crontab it's written:
SHELL=/bin/sh. Is it Okay? Or I must put /bin/bash into the anacron's command for script's execution? In other words, do I have to specifically instruct anacron to use bin/bash as an interpreter?

Could you help me with what exactly I should put into /etc/anacrontab. Say if I want my script to run daily with a 3 minute delay. Should I make it like so:

1 3 mytestscript /bin/bash /home/myname/bin/script.sh

P.S. It says "command not found" in the terminal when I go somewhere and then type my script's name. Maybe I should put it in path or something?

The script will run as root. Since you use the full path in your anacrontab it does not matter where the file is located.

Thanks for your reply!

So I don't have to specifically instruct anacron to use /bin/bash then? If so,okay... But one more thing though. You wrote "cron.weekly" in the command above. Some tell me to use cron.daily. What's the difference? Let's say that I want anacron to execute my script every day. So I don't understand why you wrote cron.weekly, as opposed to cron.daily?

cron.weekly is the job identifer. The name of the time stamp file saved in /var/spool/anacron. It probably should be different from the other cron.weekly jobs.

Just to confuse you a bit you could put your script in /etc/cron.weekly and it will run with the normal system weekly jobs.

Then why the job identifier must be either "cron.daily" or "cron.weekly". Why can't it be, say, "mybackupscript"?

Sorry for the confusion, it can be mybackupscript.

OK, thanks!