Job scheduling using crontab, what will happen when computer is shutdown during that time?

I schedule some tasks using crontab.

What will happen if my computer is shutdown or turned off during the time when cron was scheduled to do something?

Does each missed cron job run after computer is turned on, or are missed jobs for that day ignored? If missed jobs don't resume, is there any way to configure cron such that it runs the missed tasks after the computer is turned back on?

When your computer is shut down (or the cron daemon is otherwise not running), cron jobs will not be started.

If you have jobs that you would like to run after the fact during those times when the computer is shut down, use anacron. Installed by default, see "man anacron", "man anacrontab", or the file /etc/anacrontab for more info.

Ubuntu uses anacron by default for crontab entries in:

/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.weekly
/etc/cron.monthly

leaving the remaining crontabs to be handled by the main cron daemon, specifically:

/etc/crontab
/etc/cron.d
/var/spool/cron

NOTES

Anacron itself does not run as a daemon, but relies on system startup scripts and cron itself to run.

On the Ubuntu 8.04 box I'm looking at, /etc/init.d/anacron is run at boot, and again by cron each morning at 07:30.

The README at /usr/share/doc/anacron/README.gz has a slight bit more info than is contained in the manpages.

EXAMPLES

For simple "daily", "weekly", "monthly" jobs, put a copy of or a symlink to the script in one of the /etc/cron.{daily|weekly|monthly} directories above. Anacron will take care of running it daily/weekly/monthly, and if your computer is off on the day the "weekly" scripts would normally run, it'll run them the next time the computer is on.

As another example, assuming you have a script here: /usr/local/sbin/maint.sh

And you wish to run it every three days, the standard entry in /etc/crontab would look like this:

# m h dom mon dow user  command
0 0 */3 * * root /usr/local/sbin/maint.sh

If your computer was not on at 00:00 on the 3rd of the month, the job would not run until the 6th.

To have the job instead run on the 4th when the computer is off and "misses" the run on the 3rd, you'd use this in /etc/anacrontab (don't forget to remove the line from /etc/crontab):

# period delay job-identifier command
3 5 maint-job /usr/local/sbin/maint.sh

The "delay" of "5" above means that anacron will wait for 5 minutes before it runs this job. The idea is to prevent anacron from firing things off immediately at boot time.

This depends on which cron scheduler you use. The basic, vanilla cron daemon will not run tasks that were missed due to system downtime. However, there are other cron schedulers specifically designed for this situation which will do this for you. The two most common examples are anacron and fcron.

Tasks scheduled while the computer is off will not be run when the computer powers back on

If you shutdown while the cron jobs are running, the system shuts down and the cron jobs stop (or don't run).

One alternative you can check into is anacron.