Cron Tips for not running cron jobs on holidays (the monday of a three day weekend)

Question

We have about a one hundred machine set-up with each machine running cron jobs like starting and stopping services and archiving these services' log files at the end of the day to a centralized repository.

One headache we have is the three-day weekend (we're closed on holidays). We don't want the services starting up on those days and connecting to our business partner's machines.

We currently do this by manually commenting out the most critical jobs and letting a bunch of errors happen all day. Not ideal.

Basically if a job has '1-5' set in the day field we want this to mean 'work days' and not Monday to Friday'. We have a database that keeps track of which days are indeed 'work days'

So, is it possible to override Cron's day-matching algorithm, or is there some other way to easily set a cron setting to avoid things starting up on a Monday holiday?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Cron doesn't support this kind of determination. It gets very complicated very fast. Here in Canada, the holidays aren't even consistent between provinces.

I would write a runner script that check a holiday database and exits if it is a holiday. Try something like:

#!/bin/bash

TODAY=$(date +%Y%m%d)
if grep -q $TODAY /etc/holidays; then
   echo Skipping holiday for $*
   exit 0
fi

$*

Answer 2

I can imagine a few ways of doing this but the most practical solution will depend on the exact setup of all the cron jobs. For example:

If the work day database can be interrogated via a script, you could have a cron job run on Sunday that determines whether the next day (Monday) is a working day or not and sets/clears a file somewhere. All the cron jobs could look for the presence of this file and choose to run or exit accordingly.

OR

You could replace all the individual cron entries with one master job that only fires off all the others if the (checkable) database says it's a working day.