Comment by jerf

1 hour ago

"You just put numbers aligned with the titles."

That is not a fair summarization of their point because that is not the grammar. There's commas, slashes, asterisks, combinations, and then if you want randomization you need to put it in the command itself because cron can't do it. (Some crons can, but it's not a general capability of cron.) Writing a non-trivial cron spec is not easy.

4 comments

jerf

eqvinox 44 minutes ago

How do you express those things in a systemd timer? E.g. run something 4x per day, */6 in cron.

ecnahc515 8 minutes ago
Something like:
OnCalendar=00/6
You can test it with:
systemd-analyze calendar --iterations=6 '0/6:00:00'
The format is `DayOfWeek Year-Month-Day Hour:Minute:Second`
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

iam-TJ 12 minutes ago

  $ systemctl cat public-inbox-watch@.timer
  # /etc/systemd/system/public-inbox-watch@.timer
  [Unit]
  Description=Periodic fetch of public mailing list

  [Timer]
  # twice a day
  OnCalendar=*-*-* 5,17:35
  RandomizedDelaySec=1h
  Persistent=true

  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target

eqvinox 4 minutes ago

I, er, what? It's... the same as cron? I'm confused now. It's not exactly the same, I guess?