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| Chapter 40 Delayed Execution |

## 40.10 nextday, nextweekday: Tomorrow or Next Weekday

nextday | Before my UNIX systems had personal crontabs (40.12), I wanted a way to make an at job (40.3) repeat itself the next weekday (skipping Saturday and Sunday) or, sometimes, every day. Our at was simple-minded and didn't understand dates like now + 1 day. This script with two names, nextday and nextweekday, did the job. I called it from inside my at job, like this:

    `...`
    % cat atjob
    somecommand
    sleep 60
    at 2325 `nextweekday` < atjob

On Thursday, the result will be a command like `at 2325 Friday atjob`. On Friday, the command will be `at 2325 Monday atjob`; using nextday instead, the result would be `at 2325 Saturday atjob`.

The -n option returns a numeric weekday.

> NOTE: This script only works with some versions of date. If your version doesn't understand format strings like `+%``format`, install the date (51.10) from the CD-ROM.

You can install this script from the CD-ROM or from the online archive (52.7). If you get it from the archive, ask tar to install nextday and its other link:

>     % tar xvf archive.tar nextday nextweekday
>     x nextday, 1564 bytes, 4 tape blocks
>     nextweekday linked to nextday

The script tests the name it was called with, in `$0`, to decide which command to run.

- JP

40.9 Checking and Removing Jobs |  | 40.11 Send Yourself Reminder Mail