cron behavior

[John Abreau]

will <willg at bluesock.org> writes:

> There are a series of Cron substitutes.  Anyone have experience with them 
> and this sort of issue?  I'm wondering if the substitutes have a different 
> method of scheduling that enables them to more adequately handle this sort 
> of thing.  I know with backups and various other business-process sorts of 
> thing, the "fourth monday" thing happens a lot.  So I'd be kind of 
> surprised to find that no one has solved it short of shim scripting.

If you replace cron, or "fix" the "broken" behavior, anything you write 
that
depends on the new behavior will be inherently unportable; it will break
on every other Unix box that hasn't been similarly modified. You also risk
breaking anything that depends on the old behavior, though in this case
I don't imagine that's very likely.

That aside, the obvious, if ugly, solution is to do half the check in cron,
and the other half in the scripts. I.e., run it in cron the whole week of 
22-28 and have the script check if it's Monday before running.


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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
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