[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Anybody can feel free to edit and expand this page. Please remove the needs_attention tag if you have added useful information about the topic and remember to credit yourself in the Sources section… — Harishankar 2012/08/31 04:31


I have added the task of writing pages for cron, at and anacron to my task queue, I will hopefully get them completed soon. — Matthew Fillpot 2012/12/24 21:26


Slackware uses dcron, which can be used for asynchronous cron.

From dcron README, “In the author's opinion, having to combine a cron daemon with another daemon like anacron makes for too much complexity. So the goal is a simple cron daemon that can also take over the central functions of anacron.”

It uses the notation @freq, eg. @hourly, @daily, etc, or the notation FREQ=, eg FREQ=1h, FREQ=1d, etc. (see man 1 crontab)

The daily cron job, as found in Slackware's root crontab is

# Run daily cron jobs at 4:40 every day:

40 8 * * * /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.daily 1> /dev/null

which, for a host that is not continuously on, can become

# Run daily cron jobs whenever crond is running, and sees

# that at least one day has elapsed since it last ran

@daily ID=cron_daily /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.daily 1> /dev/null

Let it be noted that it works equally well at a cold boot or a resume from suspend or hibernate.

—pdi 2016/01/05

 talk:howtos:general_admin:task_scheduling ()