On 12/06/2015 02:23 AM, ken wrote: > Crontab offers many refined facilities for Western calendaring, but none > for traditional Eastern-- lunar-- designations. So for example, if one > wants specify regular occurring events on full moons or on new moons, > there is no way to do this. Emacs (a text processor!?) accomplishes > this. The math for calculating lunar calendaring is already available; > mathematical functions are already available for simple downloading and > so would need simply integration into crond. > > User settings in crontab would make most sense designated in the 'day of > month' field with keyword either 'full' or 'new' (abbreviated with 'f' > or 'n') prepended to a signed integer number of days (N * 24 hours). > I.e., "new+5" would specify '5 days after the new moon'; "full-1" would > specify "24 hours prior to the full moon"; "new+0", "new-0" and "new" > would all mean the same: "the moment of the new moon". > > I suppose that alternate syntaxes could be more refined, including hours > and minutes before/after new/full, so possibly useful, but then also > more complex. Alternate and more refined time periods would be a > question for developers. This could be very useful in biology where a lot of cycles are lunar based.