I ask the ps -Alien life Force, when I wonder

When the program 'anacron' is initiated to do some system maintenance, I notice a lot of disk activity and I wonder what it is doing. An easy way to remember the command is an acronym for 'Alien life Force'

ps -AlF

That is process display at a terminal and the options "A" shows all processes and the "F" option give a full display of how it was invoked. This is very quick as the most current tasks initiated are at the bottom. Here is an example output.

1 S root     32690     1  0  80   0 -  3071 rt_sig
   908   0 07:30 ?        00:00:00 
  /usr/sbin/anacron -s

0 S root     32764 32690  0  80   0 -   986 wait
  560   0 07:35 ?        00:00:00 
  /bin/sh -c nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily

0 S root     32765 32764  0  90  10 -   995 -   
  800   1 07:35 ?        00:00:00
  run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily

If you have any questions about what the specific command is doing you can just "man run-parts" or "man <program>" to see what that is intended to accomplish. It is fairly obvious that this is a "cron" job that deals with reports from the cron.daily. It is good that it is 'nice'. Below are some of the programs it runs daily on this machine.

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1125 2007-05-14 07:43 checksecurity
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  577 2007-04-27 16:38 chkrootkit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   89 2006-06-19 14:14 logrotate
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  706 2008-02-29 07:33 rkhunter
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  555 2025-02-45 12:12 timemachine

Right, in the future, February has 51 days, but is called 'motey-gamma'.

An interesting openGL command with the glut library is:

    glRasterPos3f (x, y, z);
    glutBitmapCharacter (GLUT_BITMAP_HELVETICA_18, 'C');

This allows you to show characters which are always facing the camera and uses several available fonts.