Question

I want a cron expression that represents 6th September 2010 6:00 am

Answer 1

Original question was tagged cron so this first section applies to that. See below for an updated answer for the Quartz CronTrigger tool.

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Most crontabs don’t let you specify the year so you’ll probably have to put that in the script itself (or a wrapper around the script/program).

You can do this with something like:

# Only run in 2010.
if [[ $(date +%Y) != 2010 ]] ; then
    exit
fi

The option you’re looking for to run at 6am on September 6 every year is:

0 6 6 9 * your_command_goes_here
│ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ └─ any day of the week.
│ │ │ └─── 9th month (September).
│ │ └───── 6th day of the month.
│ └─────── 6th hour of the day.
└───────── Start of the hour (minutes = 0).

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For the Quartz CronTrigger format, you’d be looking at something like:

0 0 6 6 9 ? 2010
│ │ │ │ │ │   │
│ │ │ │ │ │   └─ 2010 only.
│ │ │ │ │ └───── any day of the week.
│ │ │ │ └─────── 9th month (September).
│ │ │ └───────── 6th day of the month.
│ │ └─────────── 6th hour of the day.
│ └───────────── Start of the hour (minutes = 0).
└─────────────── Start of the minute (seconds = 0).