Coder of Salvation™ — programming / opensource / console / minimal

Conditional Cron

Problem

Cron is our friend, but only programmed to be loyal & faithfull. In some cases we want cron to do something..and sometimes not (condition).

Solution

Instead of writing/seperating crontasks, make one smart cronjob using the date-cmd.

Example

0 0 * * * /home/username/somecmdA >> .cron.log                                  
0 1 * * * /home/username/somecmdB >> .cron.log                                  
0 0 1 * * /home/username/somecmdC >> .cron.log

What if all commands are doing the same stuff..seperation can be good and bad.

Possible solution

0 0 * * * /home/username/somecmd >> .cron.log

and then in somecmd:

# do common everyday stuff
echo "doing everyday stuff"
if [ $(date +%a) == "Tue" ] ; then cleanuplogs; fi

Demo

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