Cool. Had no idea you could run commands inside a CRON expression.

    test && action

Does anyone maintain a programmatically accessible list of holidays for their company? Similar to the HOLIDAYS.txt in the article, but it would allow for things like “don’t run this the day before or during a company holiday.”

I work at a company with different holidays in certain countries, which would complicate things, and require something more structured than a list of dates. But having that accessible could be useful.

Has anyone tackled that, or come across a solution?

Great post. And if you want some control support for your cronjobs perl App::Cronjob[1] can provide features such has exclusive locking, so a job won't run if the previous run is still going, or provide a timeout, and some options for sending mail on success or failure

[1]https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Cronjob https://metacpan.org/dist/App-Cronjob/view/bin/cronjob

This is great! I'm sure like a lot of programmers, I had been fulfilling the requirement for similar conditional logic by having a simple recurring cron job run other code or database queries with the conditional logic that this post demonstrates can be done directly in cron.