A fork of upstream cronie that adds a single new crontab keyword, @patch, for scheduling jobs by patch week of the month. @patch w1 d1 fires on the first Monday of every month; @patch a2 w2 d2 h09 fires on the second Tuesday at 09:00 — the classic Patch-Tuesday pattern, native in cron. Drop-in replacement for stock cronie on Fedora, RHEL 9, CentOS Stream 9, Rocky 9, and Alma 9 (x86_64 and aarch64); install via the Copr repo below.
Math comes from the companion project patchtime (shell + Python utilities for the same week-of-month idea); this fork lifts the math into the cron daemon itself so jobs no longer need a shell-wrapper guard like [ $(./patchtime.sh) == "w1d1h00" ] && ./sync.sh.
Staged rollouts often want job A on the first Monday and job B on the third Monday of every month. Plain 0 9 1-7 * 1 (first Monday) works, but 0 9 15-21 * 1 (third Monday) requires manual arithmetic per anchor weekday and doesn't compose with day ranges. @patch w1,3 d1 h09 does the same thing in one expression — and the daemon, not your shell wrapper, decides whether to fire.
The rest of this README is from upstream cronie unmodified. cronie contains the standard UNIX daemon crond that runs specified programs at scheduled times and related tools. The source is based on the original vixie-cron and has security and configuration enhancements like the ability to use pam and SELinux.
And why cronie? [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cronie]
@patch [a<N>] w<list> d<list> [h<list>] [m<list>] command
a<N>— anchor weekday, ISO 1..7 (1=Mon … 7=Sun). Optional; default 1. Week 1 is the Mon-Sun row containing the first occurrence of this weekday in the month.w<list>— patch week list, 1..5. Required. Same syntax as a normal cron field (1,3,1-4,*, etc).d<list>— day-of-week list, 0..7 (0/7 = Sunday). Required.h<list>— hour list, 0..23. Optional; default 0.m<list>— minute list, 0..59. Optional; default 0.
# First Monday of every month, midnight
@patch w1 d1 /usr/local/bin/sync-upstream
# Weeks 1 and 3, Monday at 09:30
@patch w1,3 d1 h09 m30 /usr/local/bin/patchsync.sh
# Patch-Tuesday style: second Tuesday of each month at noon
@patch a2 w2 d2 h12 /usr/local/bin/tue-patch
# Any weekday of weeks 1-4 at 10:00
@patch w1-4 d1-5 h10 /usr/local/bin/business-day-job
Pre-built RPMs are published to a Copr repo. Enable and install with:
sudo dnf copr enable nashways/cronie-patchtime
sudo dnf install cronie-patchtime
The package replaces stock cronie cleanly (Provides/Obsoletes/
Conflicts are set), so dnf install cronie-patchtime on a host
already running stock cronie will swap them in one transaction.
Same crond.service, same paths -- existing crontabs survive.
Currently built for x86_64 and aarch64 on:
- Fedora 44
- Fedora rawhide
- EPEL 9 (RHEL 9 / CentOS Stream 9 / Rocky 9 / Alma 9)
The feature is on by default. To opt out:
./configure --disable-patchtime
When disabled, the build produces vanilla cronie that rejects @patch
with the standard "bad time specifier" error.
See man crontab (section 5) on this fork for the full reference.
Latest released version is 1.7.2.
User visible changes:
Release 1.7.2
- crond: Revert setting the return path to <>. It is not RFC compliant.
- crond: Inherit MAILFROM from the crond process environment.
Release 1.7.1
- crond: Wait on finishing the job with -n option to check the exit status
- crond: Do not set the return path to <> if non-default MAILFROM is set
- /etc/sysconfig/crond and /etc/default/anacron files are optional
Release 1.7.0
- anacron: Add support for NO_MAIL_OUTPUT environment variable
- anacron: Support enabling anacron jobs on battery power
- crond: Support -n crontab entry option to disable mailing the output
- crontab: Make a backup of the crontab file on edition and deletion
Release 1.6.1
- crond: Fix regression of handling ranges (x-y) in crontab
Release 1.6.0
- crond: Add switch -f as an alias for -n
- crond: Add random within range '~' operator
- crond: Use the configure runstatedir directory for pid file
- crond: Increase the maximum number of crontab entries to 10000
Release 1.5.7
- anacron: Fix problem of anacron not being started on some desktops
- crontab: switch off colors if NO_COLOR is set
Release 1.5.6
- crontab: crontab without arguments now works if stdin is not a TTY
- crond: Fix various issues on loading the crontab databases on startup
- anacron: Expand MAILTO and MAILFROM environment variables
- crontab: New option to test crontab file syntax without installing it
Release 1.5.5
- Explicitly validate upper end of range and step to disallow entries such as: 1-234/5678 * * * * ....
- crond: Report missing newline before EOF in syslog so the line is not completely silently ignored.
- crontab -l colors comment lines in a different color.
- crond: Revert "Avoid creating pid files when crond doesn't fork".
- anacron is built by default.
- Use non-recursive build.
- cronnext: Allow to optionally select jobs by substring.
Release 1.5.4
- crond: Fix regression from previous release. Only first job from a crontab was being run.
Release 1.5.3
- Fix CVE-2019-9704 and CVE-2019-9705 to avoid local DoS of the crond.
- crontab: Make crontab without arguments fail.
- crond: In PAM configuration include system-auth instead of password-auth.
- crond: In the systemd service file restart crond if it fails.
- crond: Use the role from the crond context for system job contexts.
- Multiple small cleanups and fixes.
The source can be downloaded from [https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/releases]
Cronie is packaged by these distributions:
- Fedora [https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/cronie]
- Mandriva [http://sophie.zarb.org/srpm/Mandriva,cooker,/cronie/history]
- Gentoo [http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-process/cronie]
- Source Mage [http://dbg.download.sourcemage.org/grimoire/codex/stable/utils/cronie/]
- openSUSE [https://software.opensuse.org/package/cronie]
- Arch Linux [https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/cronie/]
- Void Linux [https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcpkgs/cronie]
Mailing list: cronie-devel AT lists.fedorahosted DOT org
To report bugs please use the github issue tracker of this project.