Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 09:31:01 +1000 From: GT <catch.all@marketmentat.com> To: Tim Judd <tajudd@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Crontab for different ime zones Message-ID: <1243207862.11905.0.camel@ubuntu> In-Reply-To: <ade45ae90905232241g5d17d9ccnb19bdd164a6252d@mail.gmail.com> References: <1243136795.29198.42.camel@ubuntu> <ade45ae90905232241g5d17d9ccnb19bdd164a6252d@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 23:41 -0600, Tim Judd wrote: > <SNIP> > > > > I propose the following: > cron itself has no concept of timezone. it is 'date' that is picking up > TZ and reporting as such. Cron's job is so simple is that it wakes up each > minute to see if it has work to do, regardless of timezone, or anything > else. > Yep - I understood that, Tim. Thew issue seems to be that cron pays no attention to TZ declarations that happen AFTER it wakes up - cron does not parse the job times using the new TZ. The thing I am struggling with is that 'date' picks up the changes imposed by 'TZ=', but then 'cron' parses the next line as if the job times are interpreted using the server's default TZ. I've tried using 'CRON_TZ=' as well as, and instead of, 'TZ=' - to no avail. What I thought ought to happen is this: * 'cron' wakes up; * 'cron' works through the crontab line by line; * at line 1 cron changes the TZ to America/NY; * at line 2 cron reads the job time in the context of having just been told that it's operating in the NY timezone (thus 45 13 * * * is 1:45 pm NY time); . . . * at line 15 cron is told to change the TZ to Australia/Sydney; * from line 14 onwards, 45 13 * * * is 1:45 pm SYDNEY time. . . . and so on. It seems that cron behaves as if it forgets $TZ at each newline within a given cron instance. The silly thing is, with all the time I've wasted pursuing this wild goose I could have built the required four crontabs, and written the script to swap them in and out on the appropriate dates. (Or I could have spent $100 and bought a shared-hosted server space to do the Australian-TZ stuff and given it sufficent permission to store the resultant data in y primary mySQL db...) Still, I think it's worth persevering with. I'm certain it can be done. > You might want to try some other determining factor, such as a shell > builtin. > > > Good luck. Cheers > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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