Re: Cron Issue

[Steve Block <scblock@ev-15.com>]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 08:53:13AM -0600, Brooks R. Robinson wrote:
> Greetings List!
> 	Hey I have a cron issue I can't resolve.  I have a standalone Debian
> machine that I use as a PostgreSQL server for a bunch of different
> databases.  Up until a few weeks ago, this data really wasn't a critical,
> but now it's become very important, so I need to back it up.  I had been
> doing a simple dump in cron like so:
>
> 30 4 * * *      pg_dump -d FSDetail | gzip > /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz
>
> 	There are no problems with it, and if the system died, I figured that I'd
> be able to either get to the actual database or to the backup, or recreate
> it without too much headache.  But like I said, it's become critical.  I
> would like automagic serialized backups so I want to do something like this:
>
> cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz /backup/PostgreSQL/`date +FS%y%m%d.gz`
>
> 	This give me a file like FS050316.gz, FS050317.gz, etc.  The /backup
> directory is an SMB share on a NAS server that is routinely backed up.
> However if I put this into cron:
>
> 30 6 * * *      cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz /backup/PostgreSQL/`date
> +FS%y%m%d.gz`
> or
> 30 6 * * *      'cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz /backup/PostgreSQL/`date
> +FS%y%m%d.gz`'
> or
> 30 6 * * *      "cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz /backup/PostgreSQL/`date
> +FS%y%m%d.gz`"
> or even
> 30 8 * * *      cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz /backup/PostgreSQL/$(date
> +FS%y%m%d).gz
>
> 	I get something similar to this:
>
> /bin/sh: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''
> /bin/sh: -c: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Try writing a simple bash script to do this. It isn't clear to me that 
cron can expand those shell commands. Write and test a small script and 
when that is working, add the script to cron.

Example:
#! /usr/bin/env bash
FOLDER="/backup/PostgreSQL"
FILE=$(date +FS%y%m%d.gz)
cp /var/tmp/FSDetail.gz $FOLDER/$FILE

Good luck.

--
Steve Block
http://ev-15.com/
http://www.steveblock.com/
scblock@ev-15.com