Anacron
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(1) 4.5

Auto-runs periodic maintenance scripts.   Free
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  • Anacron has been discontinued
  • Developer
    Ronald Florence
Anacron runs the periodic daily, weekly and monthly tasks on your Mac even if the machine (a laptop, for example) spends much of its time asleep or switched-off. Anacron silently checks when you reboot and every sixty minutes while the computer is running to see if the various periodic scripts are overdue, and runs them if necessary. The advantage of Anacron over many other solutions to this issue is that it runs as a proper Unix background process, requires no user intervention, and uses the regular periodic scripts, including /etc/daily.local, /etc/weekly.local and
What's New
Version 3.3: Release notes were unavailable when this listing was updated.
Requirements
Intel/PPC, Mac OS X 10.4 or later

*Previously available here






Anacron User Discussion (Write a Review)
ver. 3.x:
(1)
Your rating: Now say why...
Overall:
(1)

sort: smiles | time
burypromote

+66
Doug Engelbart commented on 22 Mar 2010
Thank you, Ilgaz. But then Apple should offer an option in Leopard where users can define their ideal, regular cron time. Otherwise that's suboptimal and not user-friendly at all.
[Version 3.3]


burypromote
+1

+173
Ilgaz commented on 05 Jul 2009
You don't need it on Tiger and Leopard if you never, ever shutdown your machine and put it to sleep instead of shutting down.

For many of desktop users, ''sleep'' is a convinience during daytime where they really don't use their computer. At night, most of them will shut it down since there is NO POINT of putting a desktop machine to sleep overnight just to save 10-20 secs. We don't use Windows, OS X has some amazing tricks which makes boot process faster than anything.

So if your machine was powered off every 3:15 AM instead of sleep, the maintenance scripts will never run. Install anacron if you don't want that situation.
[Version 3.3]

3 Replies

burypromote
+1

+66
Doug Engelbart replied on 04 Nov 2009
Hi; is there a tool to change the point of time at which Leopard automatically runs its maintenance cron scripts? Sometimes I'm still working at 03:15 am, so it would be better if the crons run at 06:00 am, for example.
burypromote

+173
Ilgaz replied on 20 Mar 2010
There were utilities like "Lingon" to set/hack the launchd daemon configurations but I am not sure if they will work fine on current OS X. They already warn against changing system launch daemon configurations.
burypromote
+1

+66
Doug Engelbart replied on 22 Mar 2010
Thank you, Ilgaz. But then Apple should offer an option in Leopard where users can define their ideal, regular cron time. Otherwise that's suboptimal and not user-friendly at all.
burypromote

+9
Atalantia commented on 31 Mar 2008
I'm not shure if its running on 10.5
[Version 3.3]

1 Reply

burypromote

+9
Atalantia replied on 31 Mar 2008
OK I see... no need for this on 10.5
burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 17 Jun 2005
It will not run on my Dual USB G3 iBook 500! The agony, the agony! What does it take to get it to work?!? This sounds like a great solution.
[Version 3.0]

1 Reply

burypromote

Anonymous commented on 17 Jun 2005
And yes I am running 10.4. 10.4.1 actually.
burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 21 May 2005
Is this from the same author of the previous OS X anacron port at Alistair's place? Does it matter if I install 3.0 over 2.3?
[Version 3.0]


burypromote


Anonymous reviewed on 21 May 2005
Reliable, faultless, also in Mac OS X 10.4 - I have been using Anacron quite for a while. Helps mainly to keep the logfiles in /private/var/log small. Otherwise only useful to command-line users, because it keeps the locate- und whatis-databases up to date.
[Version 3.0]


burypromote

-2
Jab47 had trouble on 17 Feb 2011
I am trying to remove this but am having problems following the instructions that came with the installer. I am getting permissions denied a lot
[Version 3.3]


There are currently no ratings. Write a comment or review now.

Downloads:8,095
Version Downloads:3,276
Type:Utilities : System
License:Free
Date:14 Nov 2007
Platform:PPC 32 / Intel 32 / OS X
Price:Free0.00
Overall (Version 3.x):
Features:
Ease of Use:
Value:
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Anacron runs the periodic daily, weekly and monthly tasks on your Mac even if the machine (a laptop, for example) spends much of its time asleep or switched-off. Anacron silently checks when you reboot and every sixty minutes while the computer is running to see if the various periodic scripts are overdue, and runs them if necessary. The advantage of Anacron over many other solutions to this issue is that it runs as a proper Unix background process, requires no user intervention, and uses the regular periodic scripts, including /etc/daily.local, /etc/weekly.local and /etc/monthly.local.

Note: This version of Anacron will run on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) but it is not needed, as the Leopard launchd will run skipped jobs when the machine is next awake.


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