Bug 55293

Summary:	When using a backslash (\) to escape a percent-sign (%), vixie cron passes the escape character to the command
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Eric Pretorious <epretorious>
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	Cron Team <cron-bugs+disabled>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Eric Pretorious 2004-06-26 18:12:00 UTC

When using a backslash (\) to escape a percent-sign (%) in a command, vixie cron passes the escape character to the command along with the percent-sign.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. crontab -e
2. create command:
   -s "Message from `hostname` (`date '+\%A, \%B \%d \%Y'`)" admin@leaguehost.net
3. exit
4. wait
Actual Results:  
E-mail subject: 
Message from home (\Saturday, \June \26 \2004) 

Expected Results:  
E-mail subject: 
Message from home (Saturday, June 26 2004)

Comment 1 Eric Pretorious 2004-06-26 18:18:17 UTC

Step #2 *should* read:
2. create command:
   0 * * * * /bin/mailx -s "Message from `hostname` (`date '+\%A, \%B \%d \%Y'`)" admin@leaguehost.net

Comment 2 Ciaran McCreesh 2004-06-27 23:52:26 UTC

This appears to be a feature... AFAICS, vixie-cron only replaces % with a newline when it's not inside a quoted string. When you're using "" or '' the \ is unnecessary.

Comment 3 Aaron Walker (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-10-08 07:56:28 UTC

vixie-cron 4.1 seems to handle this better.