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Aug 10, 2020

One-time cron job

Running one-off cron jobs is necessary in many scenarios, such as triggering a one-time alarm, handling subsequent processing after an event, etc..

In standard implementations of cron, the year field is not included in cron expression. Without introducing new tool (such as "at" command), scheduling a one-off cron job could be troublesome and confusing under those circumstances.

The bother involves adding a cron job and waiting for it to be triggered, and then "remembering" to delete it manually on time before next year's execution. Some may use an automatic method to delete the cron job once it's executed, but deleting it automatically could create a false impression that the cron job was never added and executed.

To completely solve the problem, free our users from all those hassles they could encounter and let them can still utilize the power of cron expression, EasyCron added the year field to the cron expression. The implementation is clean, causing no confusion, and no additional action is required to take after cron job execution to achieve running cron job once.

Furthermore, after the cron job is executed, just as inspecting a regular cron job, you could check a one-time cron job's execution result on EasyCron at any time to troubleshoot possible issue.

We hope that the new capabilities that the "year" field brought help.

Jun 15, 2020

Added "year" field support in cron expression

We're exited to announce that EasyCron supports "year" field in cron expression now. By appending a year field to the end of your cron expression, EasyCron will only run your cron job during the specified year(s).

In the year field, you could use values "1970" to "2099" with special characters ", - * /".

For more information about "year" field details, please refer to our cron expression guide.

Beside using cron expression directly, you could also specify execution year(s) by choosing years manually in our cron job creating/editing UI too as the screenshot below.

Choose Execution Years Manually for Cron Job