Thought I might share my new favourite utility, wday. So I've got a script that's launched by cron every Monday. It emails reminders to all users who haven't sent a progress report for the previous week. Simple.
Amongst other changes to be done, I was asked if this system could be modified so, if Monday is a public holiday, reminders aren't sent until Tuesday. Sounds simple, but I knew of no way to easily tell if a given day was a public holiday. Debian didn't seem to have anything pre-packaged, and I was starting to despair of evil calendar(1) chicanery, or having to hard-code a list of exception dates in to the script. Eventually found mday (http://www.nongnu.org/wday/) while googling for alternative cron daemons that might be able to do it. Has a quiet mode, that'll return 1 for a weekday or 0 for a weekend/public holiday, can check today or any arbitrary date you feed it. The data for NSW seems fairly complete (checked the output of wday -l against http://www.industrialrelations.nsw.gov.au/holidays/ ), and the data files are easily extensible to deal with things like uni holidays. Perfect! So I've changed Monday's job to call wday before running the script, and added a second job on Tuesday, that will only run if the previous day was a public holiday. # Progress report annoyances. # Only send on Monday if it isn't a public holiday 30 10 * * 1 benno /usr/bin/wday -q || python /home/disy/progress_annoy.py # Only send on Tuesday if Monday was a public holiday 30 10 * * 2 benno /usr/bin/wday -q `/bin/date -d yesterday +%Y%m%d` && python /home/disy/progress_annoy.py Brilliant! -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
