Percent sign % not working in crontab

by

% is a special character for crontab. From man 5 crontab:

The “sixth” field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be
run. The entire command portion of the line, up to a newline or a
“%” character, will be executed by /bin/sh or by the shell specified
in the SHELL variable of the cronfile. A “%” character 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.

So you need to escape the % character:

curl -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://myurl.com >> ~/log

to

curl -w "\%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://myurl.com >> ~/log
         ^

More Related Contents:

  1. How to urlencode data for curl command?
  2. How to simulate the environment cron executes a script with?
  3. How to create a cron job using Bash automatically without the interactive editor?
  4. How to pass in password to pg_dump?
  5. How to properly handle a gzipped page when using curl?
  6. How to include an ‘&’ character in a bash curl statement
  7. Cron jobs and random times, within given hours
  8. Script to get the HTTP status code of a list of urls?
  9. How to schedule to run first Sunday of every month
  10. curl: argument list too long
  11. Save file to specific folder with curl command
  12. Assign output to variable in Bash [duplicate]
  13. Why does shell ignore quoting characters in arguments passed to it through variables? [duplicate]
  14. How can I use a file in a command and redirect output to the same file without truncating it?
  15. How to check if a variable is set in Bash
  16. Why does a space in a variable assignment give an error in Bash? [duplicate]
  17. What is a simple explanation for how pipes work in Bash?
  18. Indirect variable assignment in bash
  19. redirect COPY of stdout to log file from within bash script itself
  20. Shell script to delete directories older than n days
  21. How to specify in crontab by what user to run script? [closed]
  22. How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory?
  23. How to extract directory path from file path?
  24. Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time
  25. Process all arguments except the first one (in a bash script)
  26. What does the Bash operator
  27. Value too great for base (error token is “09”)
  28. What does “plus colon” (“+:”) mean in shell script expressions?
  29. Running shell command that has nested quotes via ssh
  30. Run a shell script and immediately background it, however keep the ability to inspect its output

Leave a Comment