From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7 Description of problem: In crontab, I have a command in the following format: 30 8 1-7 * 0 /<path-to-script> This should execute the script on the first Sunday of each month, but instead executes it every Sunday, ignoring the "1-7" setting. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): crontabs-1.10-7 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create an entry in crontab with the above format. 2. Wait until Sunday, and it will execute, regardless of whether it is the 1st Sunday of the month or not. Actual Results: The script executes, even when it should not be. Expected Results: The script should only run on the 1st Sunday of each month, i.e. where the day is Sunday and the day of month is between 1st and 7th. Additional info:
This issue is noted in the crontab(5) man-page: " Note: The day of a commandâs execution can be specified by two fields â day of month, and day of week. If both fields are restricted (ie, arenât *), the command will be run when either field matches the current time. For example, ââ30 4 1,15 * 5ââ would cause a command to be run at 4:30 am on the 1st and 15th of each month, plus every Friday. " So your specification: 30 8 1-7 * 0 /<path-to-script> would run when EITHER the day-of-week is 0 (Sunday) OR the day-of-month is between 1 and 7 . This is the way vixie-cron is currently designed to work, and hence this is not a bug. We could not change this default behaviour without causing problems to users who relied on it. But I will consider this bug as an enhancement request to provide some kind of "AND" option that would make the condition true only if ALL time specifications matched for a job, as done by the fcron package.
As a workaround, you can add the following to the start of your script, so that it will exit unless it detects that it's running on the first Sunday of the month: case "`LOCALE=C date`" in Sun\ ???\ \ [1-7]\ *) ;; # OK, first Sunday of month *) exit ;; # otherwise quit esac That way the script could run every Sunday (or even every day, or the first 7 days of the month) and only continue on if it is indeed the first Sunday of the month. Similarly, you could replace the "???" with the 3-letter abbreviation of a specific month if you wanted to run on the first Sunday of that month, e.g. "Jan" to run on the first Sunday of the year. You could get even more elaborate by using the "+FORMAT" option to the date command (see "man date") to select on all sorts of date/time fields. You may find with this technique that there's really no need to change the crontab format to accomodate more complicated combinations of time specifications.
You can also use @monthly in /etc/anacrontab, if you want only one run per month. But I like to add to cron AND, OR option, which allow this (#0) behaviour.
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