I'm guessing I'd have to only allow a certain subset of the crontab spec, and engage some cleverness in how I store and retrieve the values so that it's indexable. I'm not sure I'm clever enough though, or even if its possible.
<TorgoX> purl, advice?
<purl> TorgoX: Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)
<TorgoX> advice, advice?
<purl> TorgoX: Don't avoid what is easy
So the bot and I unanimously encorage you to implement a small subset of crontab.
If I were dropping this in a database, I'd probably just have different tables for hourly vs daily vs weekly vs monthly. That should serenely avoid some of the nastier conceptual and implementational problems with crontab. I encourage you to just skim the crontab2english source for occasional interesting things in comments -- actually reading the whole source to try to understand it is a very bad idea.
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/S/SB/SBURKE/crontab2english_0.71.pl
-- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
