When I run this command manually at the bash command line, it works. But when I stick it in my crontab, I get this error each time it runs:

Command
-------
sudo rdiff-backup --print-statistics --exclude-globbing-filelist /home/bry/backup/vic/exclude --remote-schema 'ssh -C -i /home/bry/.ssh/id_rsa %s rdiff-backup --server' root@myip.net::/home /home/bry/backup/vic/home

Error from cron
---------------
/bin/sh: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

Any ideas?

I'm not sure it would work, but have you tried using " characters instead of ' characters, like so?:*

sudo rdiff-backup --print-statistics --exclude-globbing-filelist /home/bry/backup/vic/exclude --remote-schema "ssh -C -i /home/bry/.ssh/id_rsa %s rdiff-backup --server" root@myip.net::/home /home/bry/backup/vic/home

John G



* I have no idea what the hell the proper way to punctuate that is. Especially with the asterisk there for this.

I changed ' to ". That did not work.

How about using ` instead of '?

Crontab has a limited shell, so try to use the absolute path to all commands.

Also, just put that cmd into a script and call it. Keep cron cmds (ie crontab entries) as simple as possible.

PS If you copy-n-pasted that, you more than likely got a <cr> in the middle.

From a user on the rdiff-backup mailing list:

Per "man 5 crontab":

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 new-line characters, and all data after the first %
will be sent to the command as standard input.

So the % was causing the problem. I escaped it and it seems to be working now.

I'm also going to move my cron commands to scripts as suggested to keep things clean. Thanks for everyone's help.