Better scheduler than cron?

[Tim Medford]

I need to have a cron job run only on the last day of the month. Cron doesn't really support this unless you manually schedule 12 separate jobs per year.

Has anyone ever tried to do this? I would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks,
Tim

[Craig Rants · Accepted solution]

Tim,
Try the 28-31 days for cron and use this in the head of your script.

if test `TZ=MET-24 date +%d` = 01
then
"execute command"
else
"don't execute command"
fi

This should solve your problem.

Good Luck,
C

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Tim,

suggest you to live with the cron. It is a difficult proposition to schedule a cronjob on the last day of each month through cron, but you can get away with a few entries in place of 12. you need 3 entries, one for months with 31 days, one for month with 30 days and one for feb 28/29 days.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[S.K. Chan]

The company I used to work with uses Maestro for job scheduling.

http://www.tivoli.com/products/index/workload_sched/

[Tim Medford]

Thank you for the replies!

Craig, that is a great solution! It took me a few minutes to figure out what you are doing, but now I understand it.

Thanks again

[Roger Baptiste]

Tim,

For scheduling software, you can check Tidal software''s sysadmiral. We used it in an earlier site.
Another choice is BMC''s control-m

HTH
raj

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Tim:

I would use my caljd.sh script to do this:

Your cron script should look somethinh like this:

#usr/bin/sh

export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/bin

if [ "$(caljd.sh $(caljd.sh) | awk '{print $1}')" != "$(caljd.sh -n 1) | awk '{print $1}')" ]
then
echo "Run It"
fi

You could simply make a cron entry to run every day and the above script will take care of it. It simply looks for when the $1 (month) output of today is different from that of the next day (-n 1). I would install caljd.sh in /usr/local/bin. If you want to see how this insane caljd.sh script works, just do a caljd.sh -u for full usage.

P.S. I hope I got all those pesky quotes above correct.

Regards, Clay

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Tim:

I'm an idiot. I missed a $(cvaljd.sh) call. It should look like this:

PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/bin
export PATH
if [ "$(caljd.sh $(caljd.sh) | awk '{print $1}')" != "$(caljd.sh $(caljd.sh -n 1) | awk '{print $1}')" ]
then
echo "Month Changed"
else
echo "Month Same"
fi

The real advantage is that this method makes it very easy to run n days before the last day of the month (or only on weekdays and skip holidays with just a few more caljd.sh options)

[Jim Finkel]

We just trialed UC4, great product, and easy to use. www.seasoft.com

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Tim,

This code should work as well.

if [ `cal | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{ print $NF }'` -eq `date | awk '{ print $3 }' ]; then
execute the code
fi

Hai