Solaris

I have set up my cron job on the solaris SunOS 5.10 Generic_138888-03 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2 but it is not running on time as expected.

Would you please help me to find out what I did wrong?

I want to have this cron job run once every month on the 1st Wednesday of the month, but it ran on Thursday.

# This cron job will run the pci1 every month on the 1st Wednesday at 2:00 PM GMT

Code:

0 14 1-7 * 3 /home/jdavid/PCI/pci1

Below is the log that cron job was run on Thu Dec 1st (/var/cron/log)

Code:

 Thu Dec  1 14:00:00 2011
>  CMD: /home/jdavid/PCI/pci1
>  jdavid 10812 c Thu Dec  1 14:00:00 2011

Thank you for all help.

Moderator's Comments:

Please use code tags -see PM

If you specify both Day of month and Day of week then the command will run when either are true (i.e. the 1st to 7th, and any Wednesday).

Ah!! Thank you very much CarloM.

So how do you fix my cron job, if I just want to run that cron job one on the 1st Wednesday of each month?

Thank you again.

I don't think you can with just the crontab time parameters.

You could either work out the date of every first Wednesday (and have 12 crontab entries which need to change every year), or have an extra check on the date in the script (or the call to it).

I seached and found this.

This line is and example of running a cron job every month, on Mondays whose dates are between 15-21. This means the third Monday only of the month at 4 a.m.

Code:

0 4 15-21 * 1 /command

I think you are right.

---------- Post updated at 12:35 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:13 PM ----------

Here is the link for the example cron job above.

Cron and Crontab usage and examples

Lateral thought idea.
1) Create a cron which creates a flag file at 00:01 on the first day of every month.
2) Run your cron every Wednesday but have a wrapper to exit if the flag file does not exist. If the flag file does exist, delete the flag file and run the main process.

Cool!! Thank you very much. I will do that.