Hi Friends, Iam trying to run an export from crontab on last Thursday of every = month, the logic seems working but I got an error saying invalid Time = Zone!! with this error "ORACLE error 1857 encountered", without this = Thursday checking logic everything works! my environment is oracle8174 = on aix51. Any ideas where Iam doing wrong?? TIA Raghu. My export Script:- variables here... #####################Check for last Thursday of the month########## TODAYMONTH=3D`date +%m` # subtract 168 hours (one week from the TZ parameter) # in my case TZ=3DEST5EDT TZ=3DEST-162EDT NEXTWKMONTH=3D`date +%m` if [ $TODAYMONTH -ne $NEXTWKMONTH ] then #it's the last Thursday of the month echo "Oracle Export: `date`" >>${LFILE} 2>&1 else echo "Sorry!! Today is not last Thu of the Month!! : `date`" = >>${LFILE} 2>&1 exit 1 fi #################### Initialize Tape #################### tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 status >>${LFILE} 2>&1 tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 inventory >>${LFILE} 2>&1 tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 mount $SLOT >>${LFILE} 2>&1 tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 rewind >>${LFILE} 2>&1 exp file=3D/dev/rmt0 volsize=3D0 parfile=3D${RBSCRIPTS}/expdb >> = ${LFILE} 2>&1 tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 rewind sleep 10 tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 unload tapeutil -f /dev/rmt0 unmount $SLOT >>${LFILE} 2>&1 $ cat expdb userid=3Dxxxxx/xxxxx direct=3Dy full=3Dy compress=3Dn consistent=3Dy error:-Export: Release 8.1.7.4.0 - Production on Thu Mar 3 00:00:34 2005 (c) Copyright 2000 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved. EXP-00056: ORACLE error 1857 encountered ORA-01857: not a valid time zone Username: EXP-00030: Unexpected End-Of-File encountered while reading input EXP-00000: Export terminated unsuccessfully -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l