Crontab command won't broadcast

Jason95 · 11-15-2009, 10:18 PM

Hello, i'm having trouble running my command with crontab, on Red hat 8 by the way.As root, after doing crontab -e, i've entered a command to broadcast the date in 12 hours format ever 30 minutes, so i did */30 * * * * date +%r | wall. But it doesn't do anything, i think it has to do with the +%r part, it's like it doesn't recognize it. Any tips? Thanks.

anomie · 11-15-2009, 11:03 PM

First, it would be easy to test your theory. Just remove the formatting for a trial run to see if sends a regular date(1) message.

Second, Red Hat 8...? It's ancient, unsupported history. Time to upgrade. Some possibilities: RHEL, CentOS, Fedora.

Tinkster · 11-15-2009, 11:27 PM

I saw a very similar problem just the other day (colcucix pointed out the solution to
the original poster of the other thread - good reading). Your problem is cron; read
the man page. It's trying to interpret the %. To avoid that you need to escape
it with a \.

Cheers,
Tink

Jason95 · 11-16-2009, 05:33 PM

Thank you so much Tinkster, i got it. :P