Many thanks to everyone who replied and especially to Ric Anderson, Bill R. Williams , Francisco Roque and Michael Maciolek who pointed me to the following fragment of the man page: "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" The following cron line has been successfully tested: 10 23 * * * mv /path/to/my/file.txt /path/to/my/file.txt`date +\%Y\%m\%e` =========== Original question ============== The following command works in shell : root@host ~ # mv /path/to/my/file.txt /path/to/my/file.txt`date +%Y%m%e` But doesn't work in cron : # rotate my log 10 23 * * * mv /path/to/my/file.txt /path/to/my/file.txt`date +%Y%m%e` Root is getting an email : >From root Wed Aug 27 23:10:01 2008 Return-Path: <root> Received: (from root@localhost) To: root Subject: Output from "cron" command Your "cron" job on host mv /path/to/my/file.txt /path/to/my/file.txt`date + produced the following output: mv: /path/to/my/file.txt and /path/to/my/file.txt are identical Looks like `date +%Y%m%e` doesn't get interpreted the way I expect when running from cron. Thank you, Aleksandr _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Fri Aug 29 18:56:17 2008
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