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Crontab Issue: Cron Job is Not Working When Using Percentage

Question: What is the reason my cron job does not gets executed when i use percentage ‘%’ in my cron job. How to solve this issue ?

Answer:‘%’ is the new line specifier in cron command. Thus when you use % it is interpreted as a new line in the cron job. Let us see how to over come this issue, and use % in the cron job.

Problem Definition With Example: ‘%’ in the cron job ( non successful cron job )

* * * * * date +"%d" >> /tmp/non-working-ex1.txt

 
For testing purpose all fields in the above crontab example has * in it. This will execute the specified cronjob every minute.
 
To understand the crontab configuration, read our earlier article that contains 15 awesome cron job examples.
 
If you have access to syslog you will a similar line like the following.

Jun 20 08:31:01 ubuntu-laptop /USR/SBIN/CRON[6752]: (ramesh) CMD (date +")

 
In the syslog entry for this specific example the command is show only as: (date +”). Ideally this should be displayed as: date +”%d” . This indicates that the percentage is parsed as a special symbol in the cron. i.e it terminates the command exactly at the %age.

Solution With Example: Work around to use ‘%’ in the cron job.

You can solve this problem using the following two methods. This solution should solve the problem on all flavors of Unix / Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS, AIX etc.,

Method 1: Escaping the percentage with \

You can escape the percentage with backslash, and make it working as a normal job.

$ crontab -l
* * * * * date +"\%M" > /tmp/working-ex1.txt

 
Note: This ‘\’ will not be seen by date command, or any other command you invoke. The \ is to escape the special behavior of percentage in cron.

Method 2: Use Shell Script

Create a shell script with the percentage command and schedule the shell script as cron job.

$ cat /bin/date.sh
date +"%d"

$ crontab -l
* * * * * /bin/sh /bin/date.sh > /tmp/working-ex2.txt

At the next minute you will be having the executed command output in the /tmp/working-ex2.txt
 
Now you will have the following line which executed the command successfully in the syslog.

Jun 20 08:36:01 ubuntu-laptop /USR/SBIN/CRON[6962]: (ramesh) CMD (/bin/sh /bin/date.sh >> /tmp/working-ex2.txt)

 
Note: Don’t forget to remove these testing cron entries as it will get executed every minute.
 
If you had any other issue with the crontab, let us know it in the comments section.

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Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Head September 26, 2015, 12:07 pm

    I have strange issue with sh script running under CPanel user. As I understand, that may be caused by CPanel use virtfs and different /bin for each user. D’you have any experience with such things?

  • prax May 11, 2016, 10:08 am

    I understood the reason of cron not working with % as a result we add \%Y for any date command that we use .
    In my project my cron works every four hours, so i want to create log like date_YYMMDD.HHMMSS.log , the changes made to shell script by adding \ doesn work . whereas when the same is been run manually (running the sh)i get a filename with \entries like for the above i.e date_\YY\MM\DD.\HH\MM\SS.log