This is a template to schedule jobs (such as a daily automated backup) on UNIX based operating systems, such as Linux, Free BSD and MacOS, via the program anacron (invoked by the daemon cron). Inside the directories .config/anacron.daily/, .config/anacron.weekly/ and .config/anacron.monthly/, it runs once a day, once a week and once a month all executables

• in the folder on_line only when the computer is online,
• in the folder on_ac only when the computer is on power supply,
• in the folder on_line_ac only when both of the above are satisfied, and
• in the folder on under any conditions.

See https://konfekt.github.io/blog/2016/12/11/sane-cron-setup to see how this is achieved.

Installation

1. Clone this repository

   git clone https://github.com/konfekt/anacron ~/Downloads/

2. Copy its folders, that is, .config and bin, into your home directory ~/

   cd ~/Downloads/anacron
   cp --recursive ./.config ./bin ~/

3. Replace KONFEKT by your user name $USER by

   grep --recursive --files-with-matches '\<KONFEKT\>' . | xargs sed --in-place "s/\<KONFEKT\>/$USER/g"

4. Enable the jobs

   crontab ~/.config/crontab

Suggestions

If you want to schedule a daily backup of selected files

• to the cloud, have a take at https://github.com/konfekt/backup2cloud.sh
• to a USB drive, have a take at https://github.com/konfekt/backup2usb.sh.

Caveats

Be aware that to run a GUI by (ana)cron, the environment variable $DISPLAY has to be set, for example, $DISPLAY=:0. There are some more caveats listed at https://askubuntu.com/questions/23009/why-crontab-scripts-are-not-working, most already put out of the way by using this configuration as a template.

Credits

The run-parts.sh script is taken from https://github.com/wolfbox/run-parts (there are alternatives such as that in https://github.com/cronie-crond/crontabs), on_ac_power from https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/tree/master/scripts and cronic is available at Chuck Houpt's homepage.