Anacron and fcron, what are the differences?

Question

• Anacron is a computer program that performs periodic command scheduling which is traditionally done by cron, but without assuming that the system is running continuously.
• fcron is another implementation of cron which attempts to fulfill the roles of both Vixiecron and anacron.

What are the differences?

Answer 1

Dcron, cronie and vixie-cron (but not fcron) provide a crond daemon binary, but they implement it in their own way. Anacron was originally a standalone application which was meant to run cron jobs in systems not expected to be always on (thus the jobs are run when the system is actually on). Fcron provides anacron-like functionalities to the articulate syntax of its fcrontabs, thus it does need to include a separate anacron binary.

Resources

• http://rhce-solve-one-question-every-week.blogspot.com/2012/05/rhce-week-277.html
• http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/cron-anacron-fcron-8508/
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=135599