[systemd-devel] Feature request: schedule jobs for last day of month

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 31.01.13 00:07, Dave (dave at flex.com.au) wrote:

>  Hi.  I'm not on the maillist, but I recently read that systemd was planning
> to introduce an integrated job scheduler, if it isn't done already.
> 
>  If so, then it would be very handy to introduce a way to run scheduled jobs
> at the end of the month.  It's something of a pet peeve I have with cron,
> that it can't natively do this.
> 
>  I can work around it, but it's not pretty, and I'd much prefer a native
> solution.  I thought I'd throw the suggestion here as a good idea for the
> new scheduler.

This definitely sounds useful. We should certainly extend our syntax to
support this, and the code for it wouldn't even be that difficult.

However: we'd first have to come up with a nice syntax for it. I'd
assume we probably want to allow not only the last day of the month, but
any day counted from the end of the month. It would appear natural to
use negative numbers for that, so that "5" is the fifth day, and "-5"
the day five days before the end of the month. However, the dash is
already used to separate the day from the month, so that would look a
little awkward.

Suggestions what we could do instead?

"2012-02-:4" maybe?

"2012-02-~4"?

"2012-02-^4"?

"2012-02-$4"?

Other suggestions?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.