How can I tell cron to run a command every other day (odd/even)

Question

When configuring cron to run a command every other day using the "Day of Month" field, like so:

1 22 */2 * * COMMAND

it runs every time the day of month is odd: 1,3,5,7,9 and so on.

How can I configure cron to run on days of month that are even like 2,6,8,10 and so on (without specifying it literally, which is problematic as every month has a different number of days in the month)?

Answer 1

The syntax you tried is actually ambigous. Depending on how many days are in the month, some months it will run on odd days and some on even. This is because the way it is calculated takes the total number of posibilities and divides them up. You can over-ride this strage-ish behavior by manually specifying the day range and using either an odd or even number of days. Since even day scripts would never run on the 31st day of longer months, you don't loose anything using 30 days as the base for even-days, and by specifying specifically to divide it up as if there were 31 days you can force odd-day execution.

The syntax would look like this:

# Will only run on odd days:
0 0 1-31/2 * * command

# Will only run on even days:
0 0 0-30/2 * * command

Your concern about months not having the same number of days is not important here because no months have MORE days than this and for poor February, the date range just won't ever match the last day or two, but it will do no harm having it listed.

Answer 2

Let's check every day if it's an "other" :-) (bc program required)

0 0 * * * test $(echo `date +%s` / 86400 % 2 == 0 |bc) -eq 0 && command

(I'm not sure the code appears correctly. The date +%s part is between back-apostrophes.)