2016-06-15



Be exact!  [0]

The frequency of questions on the crontab time specification  and
the  irritating  facts  are  an indication that the format is not
well designed. Of course, the question is how to do it better ...
but  the first step is to realize that the current format is bad.
Even after several years of dealing with cron I still  need  some
seconds of thinking each time I write the date specification of a
crontab line.

It's the same for at(1) and cal(1). IMO this is a consequence  of
the  inconsistently  ordered American date format: MM/DD/YYYY. If
the designers live in a world of inconsistency, they then have to
work  hard to break it. Unix' date-related tools miss much of the
clarity other tools have.

(German's number names, which flip the tens and ones (e.g. 496 is
spoken ``four hundred six-and-ninty'' in German) are equally bad.
This really is a pain!)

[0]  https://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=161219#p1094985


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>