Per other comments though, it looks like systemd's syntax when you want to specify something that's not just that one number is at least as complex.

Is your example (which I agree, looks cryptic) any less cryptic in systemd?

I asked jippity, and it said this:

    [Timer]
    OnCalendar=*-04,05,06,09,10,11-01 04..08,11:03/4,05:00
    OnCalendar=Sun,Tue,Thu,Sat *-04,05,06,09,10,11-* 04..08,11:03/4,05:00

To which I have to go: "what?"

> Things like having control over whether or not long-running jobs are allowed to overlap

With cron that's just prefixing the command with `flock -n <lock>`, but sure the "pick somewhere to put the lock" is probably better with systemd.

> Having to re-write commands and scripts because CRON had its own special PATH

Why? Wouldn't you just put that in the crontab? I don't even see this as different. It's in the cron config or the systemd timer config.

The other improvements you mentioned seem good.

Complex expressions are one of the things I don't like in cron. On Debian/Ubuntu servers, I just bite the bullet with systemd timers. On my workstation, I have a personal job scheduler that feels easier and more fun to tinker with. The scheduler uses Starlark functions instead. For example:

  # Run if at least a day has passed since the last run
  # and it isn't the weekend.
  def should_run(finished, timestamp, dow, **_):
      return dow not in [0, 6] and timestamp - finished >= one_day

This was inspired by GNU mcron. In mcron, jobs can calculate the next time they should run using Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/manual/mcron.html#Guile-S...):

  (job
     '(next-minute-from
        (next-hour (range 0 24 2))
        '(15))
     "my-program")

I found mcron's scheduling counterintuitive and decided I wanted a function that returned a boolean. I can tentatively recommend it.

> 5,3/4 4-8,11 1 4,5,6,9-11 */2

What's so hard about "At 5 minutes past the hour and every 4 minutes, starting at 3 minutes past the hour, at 04:00 AM through 08:59 AM and 11:00 AM, on day 1 of the month, every 2 days of the week, only in April, May, June, and September through November"?

(I used https://crontab.cronhub.io/ to decode it, to be fair)