Cron – “Unexpected EOF while looking for matching “” on cron job

cron

I set up a cron job on my server running RedHat 4.1 to backup MySQL databases, and then upload to Amazon S3. The goal is to drop the .bz2 file in a folder corresponding with the day of the week. However, I'm getting the following error mailed to me by daemon.

Cron job:

MAILTO=backups@example.com
0       4       *       *       *       mysqldump --all-databases  -ubackups -pPassword | gzip > all-databases.sql.bz2; s3cmd put all-databases.sql.bz2 s3://backup_exampleserver.com/mysql_backups/`date +%A`/all-databases.sql.bz2

Error message:

/bin/sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching ``'
/bin/sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Best Answer

You need to escape the percent sign in your command with a backslash: \%, otherwise it is interpreted as the end of command.

From crontab(5):

The command field (the rest of the line) is the command to be run.  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 crontab.  Percent signs (‘%’) in the command, unless escaped with a
backslash (‘\’), will be changed into newline characters, and all data
after the first ‘%’ will be sent to the command as standard input.
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