use of percent character in cron commands

7 Sep 2003

      I encountered a strange problem in cron.

According to crontab(5) man page, % has a special meaning
in crontab commands. If used as it is, % is substituted with
a new line. To preserve % in command line it has to be escaped with 
backslash.

What I observe is that for every escaped % a character from the 
end of the command line is appended to it.

For example, my crontab entry is:

27 13 * * * echo "\%a\%b  12345"

This is converted into:

Sep  7 13:27:00 fizia /USR/SBIN/CRON[1851]: (pike) CMD (echo "%a%b  12345"5")

Looks strange, doesn't it? Am I hitting some known bug in cron?

How can I use % without growing command line?

This is SuSE 8.2, cron-3.0.1-701

Thanks, -Kastus