Cron error with using backquotes

Question

The following works fine from command line

/usr/bin/mysqldump -uUser -pPass Db_name > /var/www/db_backup/db.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`.sql 

but

Answer 1

Try it with $() instead of backticks. And you probably do need to escape the percent signs since cron converts them to newlines otherwise.

* 0 * * * /usr/bin/mysqldump -uUser -pPass Db_name > /var/www/db_backup/db.$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).sql

Also, you should store the password in an option file with secure permissions (eg. 600 or 640) instead of passing it on the command line.

Answer 2

Put your one line script (as shown) into a proper script file and invoke that from cron:

$ cat /usr/local/bin/db-backup
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/mysqldump -uUser -pPass Db_name > \
   /var/www/db_backup/db.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`.sql 
$ # use RHEL commands to add db-backup to your crontab