Apex delete stale jobs

Question

I have a few apex jobs which become stale (i.e. they just lie around in scheduled jobs queue with no nextfiretime) if an exception is hit while running the schedulable class. I cannot abort these jobs using the System.abort(jobId) since the job is not running. What is the best way to delete such stuck/erroneous apex jobs with no next fire time? Should I just query the cronTrigger objects and delete them?

List<CronTrigger> ctriggers = [SELECT Id, NextFireTime FROM CronTrigger
                      WHERE CronJobDetail.Name like 'JobName%'
                      And NextFireTime = NULL];

delete ctriggers;

Answer 1

I seem to think I've had this issue before and solved it using, e.g.:

System.purgeOldAsyncJobs(Date.today().addMonths(-12));

You might want to test it on a smaller date range though.

See docs for details.