Friday, January 28, 2011

Why did my cron job run twice when the clocks went back?

The clocks went back an hour last night at 2am - British Summer Time ended. My backup job is scheduled to run daily at 01:12. It ran twice. This is on a Debian Lenny server.

man cron says:

if the time has moved backwards by less than 3 hours, those jobs that fall into the repeated time will not be re-run

The crontab entry is: 12 1 * * * /home/lawnjam/bin/backup.sh

What's going on?

  • Ah, turns out it's a Debian bug. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=217836

    Fixed in cron 3.0pl1-109, but Lenny is still on 3.0pl1-105.

    hmallett : First reported in 2003! That's a speedy fix...
    Steven Monai : That's why I never schedule any cron jobs to run between 1am and 3am. Glad to see this bug will be gone in Debian Squeeze.
    From lawnjam

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