There is no way to avoid having one line per weekday in the config, but that doesn't mean that you have to write the definitions out by hand :-) A quick shellscript to echo each weekday with an argument and you should be good to go. Here you go: #!/bin/sh echo "sunday $1" echo "monday $1" echo "tuesday $1" echo "wednesday $1" echo "thursday $1" echo "friday $1" echo "saturday $1" Add the above to a dir in your path, then when you need to add a timeperiod definition you can use ":r ! timeperiod.sh 04:00-21:00" in vi, or something similar in your editor of choice. <div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Justin Pryzby <<a href="mailto:justinp@norchemlab.com">justinp@norchemlab.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Is there a shorter way of expressing this? We have several cases where we need this, with different intervals. I was hoping there was a way of writing it in fewer than 10 lines each. define timeperiod { sunday 04:00-21:00 monday 04:00-21:00 tuesday 04:00-21:00 wednesday 04:00-21:00 thursday 04:00-21:00 friday 04:00-21:00 saturday 04:00-21:00 } Thanks, Justin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Throughout its 18-year history, RSA Conference consistently attracts the world's best and brightest in the field, creating opportunities for Conference attendees to learn about information security's most important issues through interactions with peers, luminaries and emerging and established companies. <a href="http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev" target="_blank">http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev</a> _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list <a href="mailto:Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net">Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net</a> <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users" target="_blank">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users</a> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null </blockquote></div> -- Martin Melin ____________________________ op5 AB <a href="http://www.op5.com">http://www.op5.com</a> <a href="http://www.op5.org/">http://www.op5.org/</a> <a href="http://www.op5.com/op5/products/network-monitor/nagios/">http://www.op5.com/op5/products/network-monitor/nagios/</a>