Feature added by: Staffan Tjernstrom (staffantj)
Feature #312961, revision 1
Title: Timezone aware cron
Package Wishlist: Unconfirmed
Priority
Requester: Desirable
Requested by: Staffan Tjernstrom (staffantj)
Partner organization: openSUSE.org
Description:
With this âpushâ yesterday: changeset: 8439:51a23ac0d2a6 user: Chris Gerhard date: Tue Dec 23 15:44:14 2008 +0000 files: usr/src/cmd/cron/Makefile usr/src/cmd/cron/cron.c usr/src/cmd/cron/cron.h usr/src/cmd/cron/crontab.c usr/src/cmd/cron/funcs.c description: PSARC/2007/503 crontab entry environment variables 6518038 cron & crontab should support multiple timezones OpenSolaris finally contains a version of cron that understands and correctly handles having different timezones. You can also specify a different home directory (useful when you don't want NFS to get involved in your cron job for any reason) and shell to run jobs in. It should be in build 106 of OpenSolaris & Nevada. This brings you crontab in line with at(1) which has been timezone aware for some time. To use simply set the variables HOME, TZ and SHELL in your crontab file and all subsequent lines will use those values until the next HOME, TZ and SHELL lines are found: SHELL=/usr/bin/ksh TZ=Africa/Abidjan HOME=/tmp/cg13442 23 \* 1-9,11-26,28-29,31 2-10,12 \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontest.sh.1.1 23 \\\* 1-9,1 1-26,28-29,31 2-10,12 \\\* Africa/Abidjan HOME=/var/tmp/cg13442 3 0-7,9-10,12-22 1-6,8-9,11-21,24-26,28 1-7,9-10,12 \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontes t.sh.1.1 3 0-7,9-10,12-22 1-6,8-9,11-21,24-26,28 1-7,9-10,12 \\\* Africa/Abidjan TZ=Africa/Accra 37 0-2,4-5,7-17,20-22 \* \* \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontest.sh.1.1 37 0-2,4-5,7-17,2 0-22 \\\* \\\* \\\* Africa/Accra
Test Case:
SHELL=/usr/bin/ksh TZ=Africa/Abidjan HOME=/tmp/cg13442 23 \* 1-9,11-26,28-29,31 2-10,12 \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontest.sh.1.1 23 \\\* 1-9,1 1-26,28-29,31 2-10,12 \\\* Africa/Abidjan HOME=/var/tmp/cg13442 3 0-7,9-10,12-22 1-6,8-9,11-21,24-26,28 1-7,9-10,12 \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontes t.sh.1.1 3 0-7,9-10,12-22 1-6,8-9,11-21,24-26,28 1-7,9-10,12 \\\* Africa/Abidjan TZ=Africa/Accra 37 0-2,4-5,7-17,20-22 \* \* \* exec /var/tmp/cron/crontest.sh.1.1 37 0-2,4-5,7-17,2 0-22 \\\* \\\* \\\* Africa/Accra
Use Case:
Possibly useful for the Oracle/Sun take-out effort. You're running a server that needs to be aware of the Summer / Winter time transitions in several timezones for a single application. Say for instance you have cron jobs to do a end-of-day summary for London and New York and Tokyo.
No matter which timezone you set the system to, one of those jobs would run at the wrong time of the day at least one week of the year.
Business case (Partner benefit):
openSUSE.org: Sun competition.
Saves having to chroot (and maintain) away multiple cron instances for a single account to maintain different "local" timezones.
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openSUSE Feature:
https://features.opensuse.org/312961
