How to pipe commands for a cron job?

[mzsade]

Hi i want to..at least that's what i think i want to do..sudo gedit /etc/crontab so as to pipe the output of "date" to the input of "date --set" and the resulting output to the input of "hwclock --systohc".

Is this right, for 00:00 hrs. every 15th of December for every day of the week?

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0 0 15 12 *  root /usr/bin/date | date --set | hwclock --set --date

Will the cron job be aborted for a particular day if the computer happens to be powered off at the scheduled time?

[noodlyappendage]

I don't believe you can use date -set that way. What is it that you're trying to do?
AFAIK, cron requires the machine to be up to run the command. If you need this, you might look at anacron instead.

[Habitual]

...Is this right, for 00:00 hrs. every 15th of December for every day of the week?

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0 0 15 12 *  root /usr/bin/date | date --set | hwclock --set --date

It looks correct but I'd /path/to/date and /path/to/hwclock

Also, you CAN use pipes this way but it may have unpredictable results, so I'd recommend

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#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/date | /usr/bin/date --set | /usr/bin/hwclock --set --date

Your path to hwclock may not actually be /usr/bin/hwclock, so check.

and call it in cron with

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0 0 15 12 *  root /path/to/your/script.sh

Will the cron job be aborted for a particular day if the computer happens to be powered off at the scheduled time?

Yes.

If it gives you any grief, run the /path/to/your/script.sh from terminal and see if it does the job correctly/as expected, if not
modify the script slightly with

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#!/bin/bash
set -x
/usr/bin/date | /usr/bin/date --set | /usr/bin/hwclock --set --date

and run that in terminal and it will show you "more" (errors etc)..

HTH.

[noodlyappendage]

If I try

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date | date --set

on the command line, I get

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date: option '--set' requires an argument

which makes sense since the format for setting a date is

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date --set=STRING

per the date manpage, so I don't think this pipeline can work as written.

[Habitual]

This may help...
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-set- ... nd-prompt/

What's wrong with using an NTP Server to set the clock/date?

[mzsade]

This may help...
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-set- ... nd-prompt/

What's wrong with using an NTP Server to set the clock/date?

Thanks, that's a very useful link to explore. What i intend is to schedule synchronization of h/w and system clocks with the output of "date" on given days. Now this gui based app, system-date-admin does it very well, only i don't know how to use cron with it.

[noodlyappendage]

If you have NTP working, do you really need to synchronize the hw clock?
But if you do need to, is

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hwclock --systohc

what you are looking for?

[mzsade]

How do i specify NTP servers, and how do i use this "Date and time" app in a cron job?

[noodlyappendage]

Here is a page with a list of NTP servers for India.
http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/in

NTP will periodically update your system clock to match a canonical source clock, so that your system time is up to date. This is handled automatically by NTP without you having to enter a cron job.
Now, supposing your system clock is up to date, is it really important to keep the hardware clock up to date? In my experience, NTP is sufficient. I think that when you resume from suspend, or boot, ntp will update the system clock as soon as there's network access, so the amount of time you are relying on the hardware clock is really very small. However, if you decide you really want to sync the hardware clock, then adding a cron job that does

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hwclock --systohc

should take care of it.