Because ECF was designed with ECMWF suites in mind, the date is a very important notion.
Different suites can have different clocks.
There are two kinds of clocks:
- Real clocks: A suite using a real clock will have its clock matching the clock of the machine.
- Hybrid clocks: A hybrid clock is a complex notion: the date and time are not connected. The date has a fixed value during the complete execution of the suite. This will be mainly used in cases where the suite does not complete in less that 24 hours. We are guaranteed that all the tasks of this suite are using the same date. On the other hand, the time follows the time of the machine.
A suite clock can be modified by a gain. This is useful for suites running on older
data (e.g. cleaning up old data).
Once a suite is complete, it can be repeated automatically, with a different date.
The value of the date is in the generated variable ECF_DATE, and the value of the time is in ECF_TIME.
ECF_CLOCK contains other information such as the day of week.
It is safer for a job to always use the suite generated time and date variable‘s,
and not access directly the system date to prevent confusion.
What to do:
- Try to modify the suite to run with a clock date from the previous week use :ecf_client –alter
- Check the values of the ECF variable‘s