using the percent (%) character in crontab

Long time no blogging..

I have been using cron since I started using linux, ages back. I have never needed to use a “%” character within the command line before, since I have been encapsulating everything in scripts. Yesterday I wanted to make one of the scripts here at marin software a tad more generic, and added the line:

0 8 * * * ~/scripts/script.sh "`date +'%F %H:%M:%S' -d yesterday`"

to crontab. Now, this did not work.

I did not know that the “%” character denotes a new line in crontab. Anyway, this is useful if you want to run a script with some percent characters in the input or if you want to run a mysql query containing % in your crontab line.

I guess you learn something new every day, even though this might be a simple thing (you may already know), I just wanted to share it