Cron commands to plain English • Hacker News Board

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#11

Post by pwenzel » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

This is nice.

I also turn to http://cronwtf.github.io when I need to sanity-check my crontab, which is a little more verbose and includes JSSpec tests.

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#12

Post by callesgg » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

Not bad, each line in my cron has somthing lke that next to it :)

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#13

Post by ajmurmann » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #4

Does not understand this syntax: "1-56/5 * * * * foo"

What does that do?

CronWTF doesn't understand it either and that one even has a cat!

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#14

Post by riquito » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 10:26 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #13

mike-cardwell wrote: post #4

Does not understand this syntax: "1-56/5 * * * * foo"

What does that do? CronWTF doesn't understand it either and that one even has a cat!

> 1-56/5 * * * * foo

The first minute of the hour, then every 5 minutes until the 56th minute, inclusive

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#15

Post by gav » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 10:28 PM UTC

Also see crontab2english: http://interglacial.com/pub/crontab2english.html

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#16

Post by hueving » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #13

mike-cardwell wrote: post #4

Does not understand this syntax: "1-56/5 * * * * foo"

What does that do? CronWTF doesn't understand it either and that one even has a cat!

Every 5 starting at 1 instead of 0

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#17

Post by jchavannes » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

For visualizing a large quantity of crons, I'd recommend something akin to https://github.com/federatedmedia/cronviz which will graphically show when jobs are scheduled to run.

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#18

Post by thomseddon » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 11:15 PM UTC

I built the opposite version of this, convert plain English to cron commands: http://thomseddon.github.io/cronstring

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#19

Post by ushi » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 11:27 PM UTC

thomseddon wrote: post #18

I built the opposite version of this, convert plain English to cron commands: http://thomseddon.github.io/cronstring

Awesome, now you have a test suite

    assert(cronchecker(cronstring(input)) == input)

Re: Cron commands to plain English

#20

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Aug 02, 2014, 10:22 AM UTC

OK, so I gave it this:

    8-59/30 * * * * do_something

It replied:

    The command do_something will execute
    the 8th through 59/30th minutes of
    every hour every day.

That's a pretty poor description of something that will run at 8 and 38 minutes past the hour, every hour of every day.

Not impressed - seems overly simplistic.