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Tasklist

FS#17776 - cron fails at parsing Sunday as 7

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Dirk (dsohler) - Saturday, 09 January 2010, 23:58 GMT
Last edited by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Sunday, 10 January 2010, 00:29 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Core
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:

Since May 2009 i’m running a small server-like system here at my home in the LAN. Recently i noticed that some of my defined cron jobs are not executed. I did some investigation and tracked it down to cronjobs that should run on Sundays. Example line:

50 14 * * 7 the command and its parameters

This worked like forever. But as i wrote: recently it fails. cron daemon reports following in /var/log/crond:

10-Jan-2010 00:23 failed user dirk parsing 7 the command and its parameters

Whereas 10-Jan-2010 00:23 changes every minute to the corresponding current date. And – of course – the cron job does not run at Sundays, as it did a week (maybe two weeks) ago.

I have to refer to Sunday with 0 instead. [Stop reading here, thats it with the description, now following: a little rant] With zero! Who in the right mind using a week day numbering starting at the week’s LAST day and ZERO? According to ISO 8601 its Monday (1), Tuesday (2), Wednesday (3), Thursday (4), Friday (5), Saturday (6), Sunday (7). Why the heck does cron’s week start at Sunday with number 0?

And another more important question is: why was i not informed about this EXTREMELY EMINENT usage change during update?



Steps to reproduce:

1. Define a cron job for running at Sundays with week numbering according to international date and time notation standard ISO 8601 (Sunday is 7 as stated above)

2. See /var/log/crond for minutely failing notification
This task depends upon

Closed by  Jan de Groot (JGC)
Sunday, 10 January 2010, 00:29 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Additional comments about closing:  ISO standards have nothing to do with documented behaviour.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Sunday, 10 January 2010, 00:29 GMT
7 as weekday for sunday is not documented behaviour, the manpage of crontab shows 0 as number for sunday. Maybe glibc round-tripped your 7 in previous versions to a sunday, but 7 certainly isn't a valid weekday in crontab. This is documented in man 1p crontab (man 1 crontab shows examples with mon-wed that should also work), and also when googling around I can't find anything about 7 being a valid weekday in crontab.

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