On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 12:52:33PM -0700, Charles Curley wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:13:49 -0500
> Jeffrey Walton <noloa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > The debian wiki suggests that the handling of cron/anacron is
> > > evolving.
> >
> > That sounds like a euphemism for "being killed off" by Systemd and
> > its timers.
>
> These days cron and anacron are run as services/timers by systemd.
>
> root@hawk:~# systemctl list-units '*cron*'
> UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION
>
> cron.service loaded active running Regular background program
> processing daemon
> anacron.timer loaded active waiting Trigger anacron every hour
> nextcloudcron.timer loaded active waiting Run Nextcloud cron.php every 5
> minutes
Systemd timers are designed to replace crontabs, but that's not what
cron.service is. cron.service runs an actual cron daemon.
hobbit:~$ systemctl status cron
● cron.service - Regular background program processing daemon
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cron.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2024-02-17 20:45:06 EST; 1 week 2 days >
Docs: man:cron(8)
Main PID: 789 (cron)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 18738)
Memory: 21.9M
CPU: 5.275s
CGroup: /system.slice/cron.service
└─789 /usr/sbin/cron -f
hobbit:~$ ps -fp 789
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 789 1 0 Feb17 ? 00:00:01 /usr/sbin/cron -f
I don't foresee real cron going away any time soon. If systemd wants to
create an alternative to it, that's fine, but people know cron, they
like cron, and they *trust* cron. Systemd timers don't have any of those
benefits yet.
