[SOLVED] Problems with crontab

[SpecialEd]

When I run the command below, in a konsole, it copies my Thunderbird profile to a backup disk and appends the current date to the file name.

cp -r /home/specialed/.thunderbird/b61br7fd.default /media/specialed/Data_Storage/Backups/b61br7fd.default_`date +%b_%d_%Y`

When I run the same command in crontab, it appears to work but there is no file copied to the destination folder.

This command however does work in crontab.

0 0 * * * cp -r /home/specialed/.thunderbird/b61br7fd.default /media/specialed/Data_Storage/Backups/b61br7fd.default_new

So there is apparently a problem with crontab and the append date code at the end of the command. Any thoughts?

18.04.1, i7, 16GB RAM.

[kubicle]

Try escaping the percent chars in your command with a backslash, from the crontab man page:

The "sixth" field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or % character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of the cronfile. Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input.

0 0 * * * cp -r /home/specialed/.thunderbird/b61br7fd.default /media/specialed/Data_Storage/Backups/b61br7fd.default_`date +\%b_\%d_\%Y`

[SpecialEd]

That works kubicle, thank you very much!