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running every second Friday

Created by dave. Last edited by dave, 15 years and 293 days ago. Viewed 6,452 times. #1
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Problem

I have a function that I want to run on the second and fourth fridays of a month. So I craft my crontab entry like this:

5 21 8,9,10,11,12,13,14,22,23,24,25,26,27,28 * 5 /usr/local/sbin/command

...which I think is supposed to mean "run at 21:05, if the day of the month is one of (8-14 or 22-28), and the month of the year is any month, and the day of the week is Friday".

However, my crontab is being run if the day of the month is (8-14 or 22-28), no matter what the day of the week is.

What did I do wrong?

Observation

This a little snip-it from the man pages:

Example 3: Specifying days of the month and week

This example

0 0 1,15 * 1

would run a command on the first and fifteenth of each month, as well as on every Monday.

To specify days by only one field, the other field should be set to *. For example:

0 0 * * 1

would run a command only on Mondays.

What I think I get from that is that you will have no choice but to run it every Friday.

Solution

Check which day of the week it is when cron goes to run the command.

5 21 8-14,22-28 * * [ `date +%a` = Fri ] && /usr/local/sbin/command
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