How to get cronjobs to skip holidays?

[Derek Card]

Hello Experts,

I have a number of cronjobs that run every weekday that I don't want to run on holidays like Good Friday. Is there a file that cron can read to skip holidays? I've looked at the man pages and found nothing.

Thanks,
Derek

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Derek:

That question came up yesterday and the answer is still the same - no, not directly. You should continue to run your cronjob daily BUT it should determine if today is a holiday.

1) Edit and update /etc/acct/holidays. I actually prefer that you create a file /etc/acct/holidays_YYYY and link /etc/acct/holidays to it for the current year.

2) Add something like this to your cron'ed script:

if [[ $(caljd.sh -h) -ne $(caljd.sh) ]]
then
echo "Today is a holiday"
exit 0
fi

[Zafar A. Mohammed_1]

Check this link which got magical answer.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x6e219607df6ed711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

Thanks
Zafar

[Patrick Wallek]

Here is the thread from yesterday:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x6e219607df6ed711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

You could probably have used the search function and searched on "cron and holiday" and probably would have gotten some hits.

[Pete Randall]

Derek,

There is a file called /usr/lib/X11/datebook/holidays (hopefully it's on your system) that could be used, with a fairly substantial amount of effort, by a cron script to determine if a give day was a holiday. Then the cron script could proceed or exit depending on the comparison.


Pete

[Pete Randall]

Clay's (Mr. Date's) solution is probably much better. It requires some manual effort to enter the holidays for each year, but avoids having to deal with things like this (from /usr/lib/X11/datebook/holidays):

"Thanksgiving"
=holiday
4th Thursday in November at 12:00 AM

and the other "floating" holidays.


Pete

[Derek Card]

Hi Gang,

Thanks for the amazing quick solutions. It looks like Clay's is the one to beat. Clay, I have one question. You said that you wanted me to create a holidays_YYYY file and link it to holidays. Why?

Thanks,
Derek

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Derek:

The answer is quite simple. Unlike the cheaper brands which purport to do Julian Days, caljd.sh actually does Julian Days and thus spans thousands of years - leap years and all without an if.

Consider the case of Dec 31, 2003 (New Year's Eve) AND Jan 1, 2004 (New Year's Day) both being holidays. The vanilla UNIX /etc/acct/holidays file was never meant to span years. Caljd.sh first looks to see if there is a holidays_YYYY file for whatever current year its calculation fall in and then look at the plain holidays file.

[Derek Card]

Thanks everybody. I created a "fake" holiday entry for today and it worked great. I also saw how to use caljd.sh in another thread to calculate the day offsets that the /etc/acct/holidays file expects. That sure beats counting days on a calendar to get the offset values!

Thanks again,
Derek