[lug] cron and date command

[D. Frye]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 02:36:52PM -0500, Gordon Golding wrote:
} I want to run a backup script and feed it today's date.  I know I can change the script and be OK, but I'm wondering about this problem.
} I'm on Fedora Core 3.
} 
} If I use `date +%y%m%d` it works fine from the command line.  But I run the same command in cron and it doesn't run - it doesn't create the log or err files or run the script.
} 
} Neither of these 2 entries work. This example runs it hourly for testing. In the second example it doesn't work either as a parameter or part of the file name.
} 
} 0  *    *   *   *  BACKUPNAME=name`date +%y%m%d`
} 0  *    *   *   *  /home/BACKUPS/Backup_to_Disk2.bsh name`date +%y%m%d` 1>/home/BACKUPS/name`date +%y%m%d`.log 2>/home/BACKUPS/name`date +%y%m%d`.err
} 
} 

Gordon,

My recollection is that the '%' is a reserved character in the crontab
file. This is based on a problem that I was bitten by back in 2001, and
I don't recall where I found the information at. You *might* be able to
use the standard backslash to escape the character and have it treated
as a literal.

David

-- 

D. Frye
dafr AT dafr.us
http://www.dafr.us/dafr