Dear friends, I have a bunch of entries in my crontab, all doing different things at different times. These times are picked up by the computer clock. However, one particular task (downloading weather maps) would benefit if it was set to download using a clock that does not spring forward and fall back. This is because these maps appear to be released according to GMT/UTC and so setting the time according to the local clock does not quite work. (I am aware that I could set my cron job to be at a specific hour later than the actual during standard time, but I figured that this would be a good opportunity to get to know of such a possibility, if such exists.) So, how do I make a single entry that uses GMT or UTC, in my crontab? While also using the local time for the other tasks on crontab?

From: Barry <barry(a)barrys-emacs.org&gt; Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:47:47 +0000 To: Community support for Fedora users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt; Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt; Subject: Re: OT: is it possible to have one cron job follow GMT/UTC? > On 21 Mar 2023, at 08:52, Mike Wright <nobody(a)nospam.hostisimo.com&gt; wrote: > > On 3/19/23 21:19, Ranjan Maitra wrote: >> Dear friends, >> I have a bunch of entries in my crontab, all doing different things at different times. These times are picked up by the computer clock. >> However, one particular task (downloading weather maps) would benefit if it was set to download using a clock that does not spring forward and fall back. This is because these maps appear to be released according to GMT/UTC and so setting the time according to the local clock does not quite work. (I am aware that I could set my cron job to be at a specific hour later than the actual during standard time, but I figured that this would be a good opportunity to get to know of such a possibility, if such exists.) >> So, how do I make a single entry that uses GMT or UTC, in my crontab? While also using the local time for the other tasks on crontab? > > That sounds ideal for a systemd timer since it has native support > for UTC. You'd need a .service to fetch the weather maps and a > .timer to trigger the .service. As far as systemd goes that is > pretty basic.

Yep defaults to UTC but allows you to specify the time zone in the OnCalendar property. This is very useful. Barry > > Everything else would stay under cron. > > Mike Wright

So, how do I make a single entry that uses GMT or UTC, in my crontab? While also using the local time for the other tasks on crontab?