Hi,
I have been running systemd for many years and in general find it well-behaved
and easy to reason about.
One thing, that drives me nuts though is timer behavior.
For context, this problem has persisted for years across many different systemd
version (currently 257) both as systemd and user timers.
Today I hit the problem again even if I asked both chatgpt and claude to help
ensure it will not happen.
The problem is this:
I have a (user) service and a (user) timer, that fires that service every day
at 18:30. The timer is persistent=no.
Yesterday, for reasons, the service should not be run, so I stopped the timer
(around 15:00, if I remember correctly).
Today, I want the timer to trigger the service at normal runtime (i.e. 18:30),
and I start the timer here at around 13:00.
Both being far away from the trigger time, I expected (and the llms agreed)
that it should wait til 18:30 to fire. As stated, persistent is false, I
specifically check that before activating the timer.
And then (the problem), it immediately fired the service as I started the
timer. And I won an hour's worth of cleanup :(
Is that expected behavior, and if so, how do I get the behaviour that I wish
for?
Regards,
Svenne
