Crontab on first Tuesday of every month

[Tim O'Connell]

Hi,

I need to run a script on the first Tuesday of every month. Is there an easy way to do this via crontab. I have tried 00 12 1-7 * 2 ksh script but as the entries are cumulative it runs on all dates from 1 to 7. I have done it previously on Unixware by writing a script to run the cal command and retrieve the date of the first Tuesday from there. Is there a simple way with cron.

Thanks,

Tim

[Geoff Wild · Accepted solution]

Not easy, but check this thread - might help:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=708384

Rgds..Geoff

[Steven E. Protter]

You can run a script every tuesday and ..

Use one of these scripts to decide if its the first Tuesday of the month and run or exit.

http://www.hpux.ws/merijn/caljd-2.23.sh

http://www.hpux.ws/merijn/caljd-2.2.pl

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The crontab entry you make does an "OR" when you were expecting an "AND" operation. There is no way for cron to do this on it's own. The solution is to create a cron entry that runs every Tuesday and then the script itself decides whether or not to execute or simply exit.

The solution is quite simple:

Use the mentioned caljd.sh; Version 2.23 is the latest and install it on your box; e.g. /usr/local/bin.

#!/usr/bin/sh

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

if [[ $(caljd.sh -N) -eq 1 ]]
then
echo "1st Tuesday; do your thing"
else
exit 0
fi

Invoke as caljd.sh -u for full usage and many examples.

[Tim O'Connell]

Thanks for the replies. Got some ideas from the links
I think I will run the script on every Tuesday & use the following to get the date of the first Tues. Many Thanks. Points awarded

cal | awk '{print $3}' | grep -v "^$" | grep -v "Tu" | head -1

Rgds,

Tim

[Rodney Hills]

Run your script every tuesday and at the start of the script do the following-

typeset -i x=`date "+%d"`
if [[ $x -gt 7 ]] ; then exit

HTH

-- Rod Hills