Release date "7 days ago" in crontab
I am running a cron that includes curl including values for startDate and endDate, which should be in yyyy-mm-dd format. endDate today and startDate 7 days ago. General format:
curl -o ~/location/filename.xml "http://url.asmx/do_this?&startDate=x&endDate=y"
Using a fixed launch date, this works via terminal on macosx:
&startDate=2014-10-01&endDate=`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`"
However, remembering that startDate must be 7 days before the system date, both of the methods below result in the error "The date specified was not in the correct format. Dates must be in the format: YYYY-MM-DD, for example, 2011-12- 24 "
startDate=`date -d '7 days ago' +\%Y-\%m-\%d`&endDate=`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`
startDate=`date --date="7 days ago" +\%Y-\%m-\%d`&endDate=`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`
Is this a problem with using "and"?
What am I doing wrong here? BTW I'm trying to keep just one command line line and not use a script in a file.
EDIT: From Google Googling and copying and pasting many suggestions, I found that the following works on the Mac forum:
$(date -v-7d +%Y-%m-%d)
However, I have not met -in before. I am wondering what it is, is this Mac specific and will these problems be on other servers?
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Unquoted &
is a command terminator. It will set the definition of the startDate variable in the background (subshell) so that it doesn't exist in the current shell. Demo video:
$ startDate=`date -d '7 days ago' +\%Y-\%m-\%d`&endDate=`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`
[1] 25595
[1]+ Done startDate=`date -d '7 days ago' +\%Y-\%m-\%d`
$ echo $startDate--$endDate
--2014-10-14
Some date
recognize it +%F
as a short hand for+%Y-%m-%d
Also, you must be careful when using date
in your crontab entry: the character %
will be newline if not escaped. Read the man page crontab(5)
.
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