Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello, is it possible to schedule cron jobs using business days instead of calendar days? I need to run several jobs on first and third business days of the month. I currently have this cron-tab entry which runs every week day at 5 AM. I need to schedule the same job on the 3rd Business day of the month. Any ideas to make this happen?

Code:

00 5 * * 1-5 pr_test.ksh >/dev/null 2>&1

Thank you.

Pramodini

I doubt cron will be versatile enough to schedule like this - even linux versions, but it could quite easily just call the script every day, and then you can provide the logic in the script to only run the required functionality if it meets the working day requirement.

Perhaps this would help..

If your system has cal command.

Code:

$ cal |awk 'NR>2 {print substr($0,4,14)}' |tr "\n" " " |awk '{printf "First business day is %s \nThird business day is %s \n", $1,$3}'

First business day is 1
Third business day is 3

Add above code in your script. compare with

Code:

date +%d

if they are same, run the script, otherwise, skip it.

@rdcwayx, I do not see “cal” command.
@citaylor, you are right, UNIX is not that versatile. I can handle the business days logic via K-Shell script, I was trying to avoid that.

Thank you both for the information.

Pramodini

check if this or this is useful

As others have pointed out, I would run a script everyday. In that script check to see if it is the day you want the script to run, if not exit.

You're only talking about 24 days a year. Create a file with the days you want the script to run. Then grep the file using today's date. If today's date is in the file, continue the script. (If not exit). It could be as simple as:

Code:

DAY=`date +%d/%m/%Y`
RET_CODE=`grep -c $DAY /home/unxsa/holiday/holiday.date`
exit $RET_CODE

We use this not to run jobs on holidays.

cat /home/unxsa/holiday/holiday.date

Code:

01/01/2011
10/04/2011
13/04/2011
24/05/2010
01/07/2010
02/08/2010
06/09/2010
11/10/2010
11/11/2010
25/12/2010
26/12/2010

@purdym , I currently have this for not running the jobs on holidays and I plan to have a similar structure for business days as well.
Before the script below runs, I have a job that checks our Corporate Holidays calendar and creates a control file using holiday_ctrl.ctrl using SAS.

Thanks.

Pramodini

#!/usr/bin/ksh
#Pramodini Rode 12-22-2009 Initial Release
. ~/.profile


CTRL_FL_HOL=team/ctrl/holiday_ctrl.ctrl

if [[ -e $CTRL_FL_HOL ]]
then
print "Pramodini today is a holiday"
print "Exiting Program"
exit
else
print "Pramodini today is a working day"
print "Execute Program"
fi