at module should allow direct time-of-day specification

[hymie0]

Proposal: at module should allow direct time-of-day specification

Author: Eric B Hymowitz <@hymie0>

Date: 2018-07-02

• Status: New
• Proposal type: core
• Targeted Release:
• Associated PR:
• Estimated time to implement:

Motivation

The at module allows users to specify a command to be run a specific number of minutes/hours/days/weeks in the future. However, the underlying at command allows (and arguably more often uses) a specific day/date/time to be chosen instead of a time delta in the future.

Problems

• The at module does not allow a user to run a job at 2300
• The at command allows numerous ways to specify the time for a job to be scheduled, which the at module does not honor:
  • HH:MM
  • midnight
  • noon
• The at command allows numerous ways to specify the date for a job to be scheduled, which the at module does not honor:
  • tomorrow
  • + 3 days
  • month-name day with an optional year
  • MMDD[CC]YY, MM/DD/[CC]YY, DD.MM.[CC]YY or [CC]YY-MM-DD

Solution proposal

These are just examples. Although I prefer the first two examples (timespec / optional dayspec), I have no specific belief that one method is better or more useful or easier to implement than any other

- name: Schedule a command to execute at 2300 this evening
  at:
    command: ls -d / >/dev/null
    timespec: 2300

- name: Schedule a command to execute at 2300 tomorrow
  at:
    command: ls -d / >/dev/null
    timespec: 2300
    dayspec: tomorrow

- name: Schedule a command to execute at 2300 on the specified date
  at:
    command: ls -d / >/dev/null
    timespec: 201807012300

- name: Schedule a command to execute at 2300 on the specified date
  at:
    command: ls -d / >/dev/null
    timespec: 2018-07-01T23:00

[sivel]

Please open a "Feature Idea" issue in the ansible/ansible repo. No need for a proposal for this type of functionality.