Hi everyone

Just wondering, is there a command or utility out there anywhere which can output a countdown of upcoming jobs from crontab?
So you can display the queue of tasks in the order that they'll next run.

Anything like this out there?

EDIT: I realise there's crontab -l but that just echoes out the contents of the crontab file. I'd like somehow to get a countdown.

Cheers, B

Happy scripting, I'll say.

The crontab file is the only evidence of job scheduling in the cron system. The cron utility reads the crontab files once every minute to see if any jobs are due to run. Therefore there is no system job queue for cron.

Your only option is to write a script to read the crontab files and create your own simulation of a job queue.

That's a shame, I just thought the OS would expose that info somewhere.
Don't think my bash scripting is up to that yet, might be able to knock something up in PHP though.

The problem I can see is if you use the */20 syntax to say eg: every 20 minutes.
Since it's not detailed in the crontab file at what point the first instance was run, so you don't know when the next 20 minutes starts/ends. Guess you'd have to parse the cron log for that to see what time that was last run.

In the meantime, I'll keep digging to see if someone's already been here!

Cheers anyway
B

Well actually - it's not quite that complicated. In the
*/X notation it always starts counting from the 0th element;
so if you had
it would first execute at
the closest hour, then at the HH:05, then HH:10 and so
forth, not at some arbitrary value depending on when
you saved the crontab file.


Cheers,
Tink