[Trilug-ontopic] CronTab exclusions

[Alan Porter]

 >     # Reboot every other Monday morning at 6am.
 >     00  6  1-7,15-21  *  1  /sbin/shutdown -r now
 >
 > So, as written, it actually reboots every Monday AND every
 > day of every other week.  DOAH!


The solution mentioned earlier -- run a script that checks
the day of the week.

Most of my crontab entries end up being wrapper scripts anyway,
since a lot of times, the command lines ending up being very
long to redirect output to a log file.  I put my scripts in a
directory named /root/cron.

This solution is not quite as tidy as day-of-week filtering in
the crontab itself, but it is very effective.


root at copycat:~# crontab -l

    # Reboot every other week at 6am.
    # Script will only reboot on Mondays.
    00  6  1-7,15-21  *  *  /root/cron/shutdown.sh

root at copycat:~# cat /root/cron/reboot.sh

    #!/bin/bash

    # Only reboot on Mondays
    if [ $(date +%u) -eq 1 ] ; then
       /sbin/shutdown -r now > /var/log/reboot.out 2>&1
    fi


Alan








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