Cron jobs and holidays

[Tim Writer]

John Macdonald <john-Z7w/En0MP3xWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> writes:

> On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 01:53:57PM -0500, Neil Watson wrote:
> > How would you ensure that a cron job was not run on a statutory holiday?
> > My current thought was
> > 
> > 4 4 * * 2-6 grep `date +%Y%m%d` /etc/holidays 1>/dev/null && my_script
> > 
> > Using this method the holidays file is kept manually.  Is there a more
> > elegant and automatic way?
> 
> The one item of elegance I'd add is to put the test into
> a script so that it can be used in other cron lines (and
> elsewhere too).
> 
> 4 4 * * 2-6 today_is_holiday && my_holiday_script
> 4 4 * * 2-6 today_is_holiday || my_normal_script

That's a good idea. Rather than "today_is_holiday", I'd probably call it
just "is_holiday" and provide the date as an optional argument. IOW, the
usage is:

    is_holiday [date]

This is easily done at the start of the script like this:

    date=${1-`date +%Y%m%d`}

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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