On Sunday 07 September 2003 11:19 pm, Kastus wrote:

On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 11:44:59PM +0200, Philipp Thomas wrote:

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Kastus [Sun, 7 Sep 2003 13:33:01 -0700]:

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How can I use % without growing command line?

AFAIK you might just as well forget it. It just won't work :(

Or use it as a feature 8-) if you add some spaces at the end of your string will it matter if they are duplicated?

Thanks for the confirmation. Now I have to put my date command with a format string into a wrapper script to use it from cron.

-Kastus

On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 06:40:28PM -0400, Doug McGarrett wrote:

Hey, I'm no Unix expert, but couldn't you put "%" in your code? I.E., use the quote morks to isolate the sign?

Unfortunately, it makes no difference to cron parser. When % sign stands by itself it is interpreted as new line and everything following it is fed as standard input to the command. When % character is escaped (\%) it should be passed as is to the command but crontab parser adds an extra character to the end of the command for each %. My original problem was that I wanted to use date command with format string from cron. E.g. date +\%Y-\%m-\%d It looks the only way to do it is to put it into a wrapper script. -Kastus