Percent Sign in Crontab

From the man pages of crontab:

The sixth field of a line in a crontab file is a string that is executed by the shell at the specified times. A percent character in this field (unless escaped by \) is translated to a NEWLINE character.

Only the first line (up to a `%' or end of line) of the command field is executed by the shell. Other lines are made available to the command as standard input. Any blank line or line beginning with a `#' is a comment and is ignored.

This means that you need to escape any percent (%) characters. For example, I have a daily backup cron which writes the current crontab to a backup file every morning, and I have to escape the date command, as shown below:

01 07 * * * crontab -l > /home/user/cron.`date +\%Y\%m\%d`

Also note, that cron isn't clever enough to expand the tilde (~) character, so always use the full path to your home directory.

If you find that a cron hasn't fired, check your email in /var/mail/user.