Re: howto tell cron run last day of month

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

On 03-Jan-01 Nate Duehr wrote:
> Would midnight on the 1st work?  Just a thought.
> 
> There's no situations I can think of where the first of the month
> doesn't exist in most locales, since daylight savings changes
> officially
> at 2 AM in places that do that.
> 
> (like here... grrr)
> 
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 06:12:21PM +0200, Jaume Teixi wrote:
>> I run a cron script 27-31
>> then inside the script i need to check if it this last day of month
>> 
>> how to check this ?
>> 
>> thanks,
>> jaume.

Try this for size:

  # `cal 1 2001 | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
     | awk '{print "export LAST="$(NF)}'`

  # echo $LAST
  31

  # `cal 2 2001 | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
    | awk '{print "export LAST="$(NF)}'`

  # echo $LAST
  28

You can get the current day DD, the current month MM
and the current year YYYY from the date command:

  # DD=`date +%d` ; echo $DD 
  04
  # MM=`date +%m` ; echo $MM
  01
  # YYYY=`date +%Y` ; echo $YYYY
  2001

  # `cal $MM $YYYY | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
    | awk '{print "export LAST="$(NF)}'`
  # echo $LAST
  31

Then you can carry out whatever comparison you want between
$DD and $LAST (e.g. if there's something which has to be
done 4 days before the end of the month ... ).

I once used to get paid on "the Friday preceding the last
Saturday of the month" -- now that's the _next_ exercise
for the reader!

Ted.

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Date: 04-Jan-01                                       Time: 10:25:57
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