On Sun, 2009-05-24 at 18:45 -0600, Tim Judd wrote:
> How about a jail for America/NY, and a jail for AU/Sydney? that might > work. > > > --TJ > That's a good solution, but I am still somewhat puzzled by cron's behaviour relative to what I expected from the man page. >From the man page for crontab(8): "In order to provide finer control over when jobs execute, users can also set the environment variables CRON_TZ and CRON_WITHIN. The CRON_TZ variable can be set to an alternate time zone in order to affect when the job is run. Note that this only affects the scheduling of the job, not the time zone that the job perceives when it is run. If CRON_TZ is defined but empty (CRON_TZ=""), jobs are scheduled with respect to the local time zone." Problem is, CRON_TZ just doesn't work as written above. If you insert CRON_TZ=America/New_York and then write the * * * * * (schedule) to reflect NY time (say), but your server time is Chicago, cron ignores the CRON_TZ definition. Here's a CRONTAB extract which provides a good example of the odd behaviour: # ----- sample crontab # change tz and cron_tz to America/NY TZ=America/New_York CRON_TZ=America/New_York # check that timezone change 'stuck' (commented out except for testing) * * * * * printf "CRON_TZ is now "$CRON_TZ". Now doing US\n" >> /home/targetdir/public_html/tmp/log.txt 2>&1 * * * * * date >> /home/targetdir/public_html/tmp/log.txt 2>&1 # Now, change both TZs to Australia/Sydney TZ=Australia/Sydney CRON_TZ=Australia/Sydney # check that timezone change 'stuck' (commented out except for testing) * * * * * printf "CRON_TZ is now "$CRON_TZ". Now doing Australia\n" >> /home/targetdir/public_html/tmp/log.txt 2>&1 * * * * * date >> /home/targetdir/public_html/tmp/log.txt 2>&1 # ----- end sample crontab The result of that will be Mon May 25 11:02:01 EST 2009 CRON_TZ is now Australia/Sydney. Now doing Australia Sun May 24 21:02:01 EDT 2009 CRON_TZ is now America/New_York. Now doing US 'date' is right, and $CRON_TZ changes as expected, but has no effect in cron. One other thing strikes me as odd: the output file is in reverse order to the crontab. If changes to CRON_TZ actually worked as written, then one would need to verify that the changes propagated 'downstream' from the variable declaration. It's not that output is being written to the top of the outfile though - output in subsequent minutes is APPENDED to the outfile. And now for the big "DUH, I'm an idiot" moment - apparently FreeBSD, Fedora and Ubuntu don't have CRON_TZ support built in. It's gotten to the stage where you have to be wary of what you find in external man pages... Cheers GT _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
