>[strace log elided...] The strace is not terribly useful. I have already reported this problem, including a working patch, and been ack'ed by the maintainer. The fix was supposed to appear in 2.1-2, but hasn't shown up at all. If you are still having this problem, submit it to the BTS, to get things rolling on this fix.
The problem is that anacron expects the return value of getopt() to be EOF instead of the proper libc6 compliant value of -1. I.e. there is a while loop in main.c of the form: while ((opt = getopt(...stuff..)) != EOF) { ... } that hangs because getopt _never_ returns EOF under libc6. I'm having to build from source debs, reapplying the patch each time to get anacron working... Alas, I can't post the patch at this time, as I'm in MacOS trying to determine if a hard lockup problem is hardware or software by working back and forth 'tween the two OSes. Right now, looks like Linux has a serious problem... -- John