submit command question

[Phillip Tusa]

Greetings to all ...

I am trying to use the submit command to execute a command procedure once a week on Monday at 3:00 AM.

I am not familiar with the submit command but from what I have read it should look something like this:

$ submit /noprinter/notify/after= ???? -
DSA20:[MDTSYS.COM]do_some_process.com

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

--
Phil

[Steven Schweda]

A common scheme is to use a self-resubmitting
procedure (forum search for "resubmitting")
which runs every day at, say, 03:00, and
actually does something if it's Monday.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1232913

[Hoff]

There's no shorthand construct for MONDAY in the OpenVMS date syntax, so you either need to calculate MONDAY using some date math, or (far easier, in my estimation) submit the self-requeuing job to run daily at 3AM, and then calculate MONDAY at run-time.

Here are examples of using SUBMIT /AFTER and calculating MONDAY on the fly:

http://64.223.189.234/node/97
http://64.223.189.234/node/501

There are various other discussions of submitting for a specific day of the week and of calculating a particular weekday using OpenVMS DCL date math around (Google is your friend), and it would certainly be nice if DCL saw the addition of weekday entries akin to the long-standing YESTERDAY, TODAY and TOMORROW constructs; adding /AFTER=TUESDAY, for instance.

The other option is to acquire and install a job scheduler, and Freeware and commercial options are available. (And discussed via links in the above articles.) I would encourage a scheduling package, as batch isn't a particularly good scheduler -- it works, but there's limited built-in error handling and no built-in error reporting.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

[Gregg Parmentier]

As long as you submit the first one for a specific Monday (say /after=9-jun-2008:03:00:00), this should work internal to the procedure.

This could be a problem if a particular run is delayed until tuesday because of a busy queue, but that's probably unlikely.

submit/after=today+7-03:00:00

[Phillip Tusa]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

--
Phil