problem running crontab jobs

[Marius Gedminas]

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 06:06:53PM +0200, Luca Ferrari wrote:
> Hi all,
> my crontab contains a rude way to backup my eclipse source tree:
> $ crontab -l
> 
> BACKUP_DIR=/mnt/disco4/backup
> DATE=`/bin/date +'%d_%m_%y'`

"man 5 crontab" gives me the impression that backticks will not be
interpeted here.

> 
> ################### ECLIPSE #################################
> 00 12  * * * /bin/tar cjvf 
> ${BACKUP_DIR}/sorgenti_java_giorno.tar.bz2 /mnt/disco1/src/java
> 00 17  * * * /bin/tar cjvf 
> ${BACKUP_DIR}/sorgenti_java_sera.tar.bz2  /mnt/disco1/src/java
> 50 17  * * 1,3,5 /bin/tar cjvf 
> ${BACKUP_DIR}/sorgenti_java_${DATE}.bz2  /mnt/disco1/src/java
> 
> Now, the first two scripts are working, while the third (the one with the 
> date) is not producing the output. If I run the same line manually, after 
> having exported the BACKUP_DIR and DATE variables, it run correctly. Any idea 
> about that?

cron sends diagnostic output by email, but that will only work if you
have a MTA (e.g. postfix) installed.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Bumper sticker: If you can read this, I can hit my brakes and sue you.
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