>>   | Any ideas on an appropriate character, or alternate syntaxes, or ideas
>>   | on prior art, or just plain ideas?
>> 
>> Please don't start adding funny characters at the start of the line,
>> crontab syntax is already foul enough.
>...
>
>Hmmm.  Why not hide this new magic inside comments?
>
># %WITHIN=3600
>
>or somesuch.

that also needlessly extends the "foul" syntax.  otoh, stuffing an
environment variable is easy enough, and already supported.  hmm...i
suppose that job_runqueue() could be changed check that a job was
being actually started within $WITHIN seconds of its scheduled start
time.  picky people could set $WITHIN to 5, generous people could set
it to 7200 (or 2h, or whatever) and the default would be 0 (meaning
"who cares").  that seems easy enough.

>> to specify the bounds on when the command should be started of the time
>> specified (with "WITHIN=0" being the default, and meaning "before time for
>> the command to run next" which is what it currently does I believe).
>> (The value would be a limit in seconds, allow "5m" and such if you want).
>
>> Personally, I'd be just as happy if cron would simply ignore time jumps
>> longer than 5 minutes - run nothing at all that was supposed to happen
>
>Personally, I think Hardwired defaults like this usually end up making
>very few people happy.

yep.

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