Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!twg.com!david From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: v23i028: A cron/crontab replacement, Part01/01 Message-ID: <8083@gollum.twg.com> Date: 14 Oct 90 02:50:05 GMT References: <2878@litchi.bbn.com> <49594@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 39 Request: (Current cron doesn't do this ...) In my most previous job I was working with a bunch of former IBM-ers in a financial reporting sort of environment. One of the things they wanted, and was surprised that cron was unable to do this "cleanly", was to have a job run on (for instance): the first monday of the month They were on a monthly cycle of generating reports. On the first some particular pile of data would be available (I think, the "general ledger" figures). From there you had a "data-flow"-like sequence of steps where the general ledger would get fed to some process which would extract some data & then send that data to various "feeds". Each feed would, in turn, do some processing and then feed the data farther down stream. The ones farther downstream would get data from various places, grind, add water, and pass more data on. ...and-so-on... It woulda been interesting to organize the data-flow from a high level .. but I went off in more interesting directions .. :-) I suggested to 'em something like fire the job every day (or the first 7 days of the month) check if *this* day is the first monday and if not then exit but they didn't like that for some reason ... but back to asking for cron features. The "nth monday of the month" class of specification would be a very good addition. -- <- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <- <- Remember: On System V it's "tar xovf", not "tar xvf"!