UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I was trying to schedule a job to run on the last Sunday of October. To stop a process that I have running before daylight savings automatically falls back at 2AM then restart it after the hour has been regained. I thought I was smart (my mistake) and scheduled the 2 entries in cron. I figured that the earliest that the last Sunday could occur is the 25th of the month.

To my surprise, it's run every day since Sunday.

50 1 25-31 10 0 $HOME/test.sh stop > /dev/null 2>&1
15 2 25-31 10 0 $HOME/test.sh start > /dev/null 2>&1

It looks like the day of week is ignored if the date is specified. Is this supposed to happen? Am I going to have to code the day of the week check into my script?

Code:

 Each of these patterns may be either an  asterisk   (meaning
     all legal values) or a list of elements separated by commas.
     An element is either a number or two numbers separated by  a
     minus  sign  (meaning  an  inclusive  range).  Note that the
     specification of days may be made by two fields (day of  the
     month and day of the week). Both are adhered to if specified
     as a list of elements.  See EXAMPLES.


     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.

your cron tab will execute everyday from the 25th-31st and on sundays.

that's what I was afraid of. I was hoping that it would AND everything.

For some help with this sort of thing, take a look at this.