Cron is a very simple, yet useful job scheduler on linux.
To schedule a job for weekdays, one can easily do “15 00 * * 1-5” which runs at 0015 UTC for Monday – Friday, since 0 denotes Saturday and 7 denotes Sunday in crontab. However, when we have to work with a particular date range, (eg. 10-15 only) we have to use the following method.
15 00 * * 1-5 [$(date +\%d) > 09 && $(date +\%d) < 16] && /path/to/your/script
Here, we are scheduling the cron for weekdays, but also adding a condition to check the date within to be 10-15.
- If any of the dates between 10-15 fall on a weekend, then the cron does NOT execute.
- If any weekdays have dates other than 10-15, the the cron does NOT execute.
- “15 00 10-15 * 1-5” cron would execute at 0015 hrs every weekday AND everyday between 10-15.
Feel free to test the desired “date” outputs:
$ date +\%d
12
$ echo $[ $(date +\%d) > 10 && $(date +\%d) < 15]
1
$ echo $[ $(date +\%d) > 15 && $(date +\%d) < 20]
0
Piyush Routray 