Question

I have the following command to show changes to a subversion repository

svn log -v -r{$(date +%Y-%m-%d)}:HEAD http://therepository | awk '/^r[0-9]+ / {user=$3} {if (user=="username") {print $1 $2 $3}}' | mail -ne -s'Users SVN commits' [e-mail]

It works fine in the command line.

When I paste it into a crontab, I get the following error message:

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

How does this need to be quoted to work?

Answer 1

When using cron, avoid the hassle of such issues by putting everything into a shell script, then call the shell script from cron.

This approach is commonly used and a good idea because:

• It makes your command easily testable (you don’t have to do stupid things like schedule an execution in one minute’s time)
• Easy to manually invoke if you have to, eg in case the job failed, ops can re-run without touching crontab – also jobs can be invoked from other jobs, eg a final job that checks if all jobs ran OK and re-runs those that didn’t
• It separates what is executed from when it’s executed – leaving cron to do (only) what it does best: scheduling
• It gives you full access to shell script features, or using different shells like perl
• It keeps crontab clean and easy to read
• Anyone developing/maintaining cron tasks knows where to look if you use a consistent directory for cron tasks (eg /opt/cron or whatever)
• You can put your cron tasks under source control – too often shell scripts are overlooked for source control, but they are code and therefore benefit from source control

For example:

dosomething.sh:

svn log -v -r{$(date +%Y-%m-%d)}:HEAD http://therepository | awk '/^r[0-9]+ / {user=$3} {if (user=="username") {print $1 $2 $3}}' | mail -ne -s'Users SVN commits' [e-mail]

plus

cron 0 22 * * * /opt/cron/dosomething.sh