[SOLVED] Trying to get 'date' to work in 'cron'

Dafydd · 07-31-2015, 03:11 PM

Quote:

dave@dave:~/Gigs$ date --version
date (GNU coreutils) 8.21

Ubuntu 15.04
Cron & crontab manuals show a date of 2010. Is this the latest versions?

Three weeks I have tried solutions I found on google, stackoverflow, WW3, ubuntu forums, linus questions and a bunch of other places. I've not found much dealing with cron and date, what I did find I evidently did not understand completely as a lot of it dealt with internal workings.

I'm not sure what question to ask. Can someone point me in the right direction?
TIA
Dave

At 11:00 pm I need to capture todays date and store it. At 3:30 am I will use this to remove expired files for a list.

Code:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
#works as expected
52 10 * * * mplayer ~/Music/Spanish_Mary.mp3

#works from the command line but not cron
48 23 * * * ~/bin/scrub_gig_list_time.sh
#scrub_gig_list_time.sh
##!/bin/bash
#create a date tag to scrub the giglist of expired events.
#date '+%m/%d/%Y' >> ~/Gigs/oldgigs
#echo "Done"

#Works from the command line but not cron
# I have tried botkh escaping and  unescaping the '%' and '>' & '>>'
13 51 * * * /bin/date '+\%m/\%d/\%Y' >> gigstoeeraise

suicidaleggroll · 07-31-2015, 03:21 PM

What do you mean it doesn't work? What does it do? Do you receive any mail from cron? Do any of the files you're redirecting to get created? If so, do you see any errors in them?

Also, you shouldn't use "~" in cron or scripts, use $HOME, and you should use the absolute path to all files (not just "gigstoeeraise"). You don't need to delimit the redirects btw.

And why are you using "51" for the hour in your last cron entry?

michaelk · 07-31-2015, 03:34 PM

In additon cron has a very limited path environment and it is best to use the full path. However, you really do not need a cron job to capture yesterdays date and save it to a file. In your removal script use:

date --date="1 day ago" +%m/%d/%Y

smallpond · 08-01-2015, 09:21 AM

Have you set the timezone in your crontab?

Dafydd · 08-06-2015, 02:03 AM

Marking this solved. Not using Bash/Cron.

Using PHP