Bug 87859

Summary:	systemd.time documentation: 'day of month' vs 'day of week'
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Thomas <fischer>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	trivial
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Thomas 2014-12-30 09:24:01 UTC

The traditional cron's manpage crontab(5) discusses the issue that one can specify the day of a calendar event with two different fields: day of month and day of week.

The same is true for systemd.time, where one could write
Mon,Fri *-*-3,1,2 *:30:45

Following cron's interpretation, this would mean the calendar event is trigger on the first three days of a month *and* on every Monday or Friday. Does the same hold for systemd.time? The documentation (man page) should specify this explicitly.

Comment 1 Chris Atkinson 2015-01-01 00:50:59 UTC

I do not believe that is how systemd.time works. As is noted in the man page:

"Calendar events may be used to refer to one or more points in time in a single expression. They form a superset of the absolute timestamps explained above:

           Thu,Fri 2012-*-1,5 11:12:13

The above refers to 11:12:13 of the first or fifth day of any month of the year
2012, given that it is a Thursday or Friday."

I read this as saying that only days which are both Thurs/Fri AND 1/5 would be included. I tested this by creating a timer which included "OnCalendar=Thu,Fri 2015-*-5 11:12:13". I then started it on Thur 2014-12-31 and ran "systemctl list-timers", which showed the service would run on Thur 2015-02-05, the next day which is the fifth calendar day of a month and a Thursday.

Comment 2 Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek 2015-01-01 14:10:04 UTC

Documentation updated in http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=a780d4cb1c. This should clear up the issue.

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