CronJob not running

Question

I have set up a cronjob for root user in ubuntu environment as follows by typing crontab -e

  34 11 * * * sh /srv/www/live/CronJobs/daily.sh
  0          


        

Answer 1

Another reason crontab will fail: Special handling of the % character.

From the man file:

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

In my particular case, I was using date --date="7 days ago" "+%Y-%m-%d" to produce parameters to my script, and it was failing silently. I finally found out what was going on when I checked syslog and saw my command was truncated at the % symbol. You need to escape it like this:

date --date="7 days ago" "+\%Y-\%m-\%d"

See here for more details:

http://www.ducea.com/2008/11/12/using-the-character-in-crontab-entries/