Cron and Logrotate

Crons

There are two kinds of cron job: cron and anacron on Linux.

anacron run with a frequency specified in days. It’s configuration under /etc/anacrontab. Cron jobs under /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, /etc/cron.monthly are triggered by anacron. START_HOURS_RANGE defines the anacron start time period.

Logrotate

logrotate is always triggered by anacron with /etc/cron.daily/logrotate. Logrotate default config is /etc/logrotate.conf. In default config, include /etc/logrotate.d means all config under /etc/logrotate.d will be included.

Logrotate will rotate logs according to configuration and refering to log file status in /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status. The first time logrotate runs, it will init log file status in /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status.