Which two statements are true about the configuration and use of cron or anacron?

The anacron utility is designed for systems that are not running continuously, such as laptops or desktops. Its configuration file, /etc/anacrontab, specifies job frequency in days, meaning the highest frequency a job can run is once per day. The primary purpose of anacron is to ensure that periodic system jobs (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly scripts typically managed by cron) are executed even if the system was powered off at their scheduled time. It checks timestamps to see if a job was missed and runs it if necessary after the system boots.

A. cron's minimum scheduling granularity is one minute, but jobs can be scheduled for any longer interval (e.g., hourly, daily), not only once a minute.

B. This is incorrect. User-specific crontabs are located in /var/spool/cron, and the main system-wide crontab is /etc/crontab.

C. The crond daemon reads jobs from /etc/crontab, the /etc/cron.d/ directory, and the user-specific spool directory (/var/spool/cron).

1. Oracle Linux 8 Documentation

Managing Core System Configuration

Chapter 10. Automating System Tasks. The documentation states

"The anacron utility is similar to crond but is intended for systems that are not running continuously." It also describes the /etc/anacrontab format as period-in-days delay-in-minutes job-identifier command

confirming the minimum period is one day.

2. anacron(8) Linux manual page. "Anacron can be used to execute commands periodically

with a frequency specified in days... For each job

Anacron checks whether this job has been executed in the last n days

where n is the period specified for that job. If not

Anacron runs the job's shell command..." This confirms options D and E.

3. crontab(5) Linux manual page. This page details the file format for cron jobs

showing the time fields are "minute

hour

day of month

month

day of week

" which establishes the one-minute minimum granularity but does not restrict jobs to only that frequency

making option A incorrect. It also specifies the locations for crontab files

refuting options B and C.