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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 11:47:05PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 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"?
This one looks nice.

> "2012-02-^4"?
> 
> "2012-02-$4"?
> 
> Other suggestions?
> 
> Lennart

Zbyszek